H-^) TUFTS UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 3 9090 014 553 149 Webster Family Library of Veterfnaiy M edicine Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts Universtty 200 Westbofo Road North Grafton MA 01536 ,\\« ■..< RIDERS OF MANY LANDS THEODORE AYRAULT DODGE BREVET LIEUTENANT-COLONEL U. S. ARMY AUTHOR OF 'THE CAMPAIGN OP CHANCBLLOKSVILLE " "a BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OP OUR CIVIL WAR" "PATROCLUS AND PENELOPE, A CHAT IN THE SADDLE " "GREAT CAPTAIXS " " ALKXANDKR " ''HANNIBAL" " C^SAR " ETC., ETC. ILLUSTRATED WITH y^CJTEROCS DRAWINGS BT FREDERIC REiliyGTOy AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS OF ORIENTAL SUBJECTS NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1 894 )^ Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reKerved. PREFACE The following pages, which ought, perhaps, to be entitled " A Globe-trotter's Pot au Feu of Horse-flesh, with a Seasoning of Chestnuts," recall to the author's mind the story of the old Yan- kee who, in default of other books, read Webster's Unabridged through from beginning to end, and then remarked that it was mighty interesting reading, especially the pictures, but it didn't seem to have much plot. May the author ask for the gentle reader's patience if he finds the same lack of sequence between these covers? And yet there is a mo^i/" running through them, which the good American horse-lover will not find it hard to follow. Brookline, Mass., 1893. ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE AMKRICAN POLO-PLAYERS Frontispiece "a country bumpkin" 2 panathexaic rider 3 old gallic saddle 8 an old-time northern plains indian — the coup 15 statue of alexander by lysippus 19 a tvhite trapper 31 an indian trapper 37 the trataux pony 4'7 modern comanche 53 an apache indian 57 united states cavalryman 67 indian scout with lost troop-horse 91 canadian mounted police 95 cowboy lighting the range fire 103 the indian method of breaking a pony 113 a mexican vaquero 125 gentleman rider on the paseo de la reforma 133 a southern rider 145 a hunting man 151 gentleman ridkr in central park 161 COUNTRY gentleman's TYPICAL SADDLE-HORSE 167 JOCKEYS l''^3 THE SPANISH WALK 181 CAPRIOLE .183 CROUPADE .... 183 HOW TO DO IT 202 HOW NOT TO DO IT 209 FRENCH ALGERIAN CAVALRYMAN ON BARB 221 CAVALRY LEAPING-DRILL IN ALGERIA 225 A SPAHI AND HIS BARB, ALGERIA 231 viii ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE REMOUNT BARB FOR ALGERIAN CAVALRY 235 SPAHI RACKING ALONG THE ROAD 239 SPAHI, EQUIPPED FOR "FANTASTy A," MAKING HIS HORSE REAR 242 COUNTRYMAN ON AN ASS 251 BICHARI CAMEL-UIDERS, UPPER EGYPT 265 READY FOR THE "fANTASIYa" 2(57 "FANTASTya" riders, ALGERIA 271 TUNISIAN HAT 274 MY FRIEND THE CALIPH 281 TUNISIAN WITH TWO-YEAR-OLD BARB 287 A TUNISIAN SHEIK 290 ARABIAN POLO-PONIES, CAIUO 293 ENGLISH OFFICER ON ARABIAN, CAIRO 295 SAIS HOLDING ARABIAN, CAIRO 299 EGYPTIAN woman's STYLE 315 TIRED DONKEY-BOY 321 WELL-BRED SADDLE-ASS, CAIRO 329 CAMEL-RIDERS ON THE DESERT 335 AN ARABIAN SIRE 341 BEDOUIN ESCORT FROM JERUSALEM TO JERICHO 349 RICH BEDOUIN SHEIK 363 SYRIAN WOMAN ON AN ASS 367 POOR BEDOUINS OF MOAB 371 PALANQUIN CAMEL 375 TWO-CAMEL PALANQUIN 379 A HUNGARIAN THOROUGH-BRED 387 ONE OF THE SULTAN's RIDING-HORSES 391 AN OLD ARABIAN FROM THE SULTAN's STABLE 397 OLD ARAB OF THE SULTAN's STABLE ON ARABIAN . . 400 MODERN GREEK COSTUME 405 COSSACK OF THE GUARD — FIELD TRIM 413 KING OF NEPAUL . 429 MANIPURI POLO-PONY 437 CHINESE MANDARIN 453 MONGOLIAN HORSEMAN 473 HAWAIIAN BULLOCK-RIDERS 479 HAWAIIAN AMAZON RIDER 488 "We Americans are a many-sided people, and our eques- trianism partakes of our many-sidedness. The greatest variety of riders Avhich an}^ one people has produced has thriven on the continent of North America. Going back to include the days, still in the memory of old men living, when the Indians who dwelt farthest from civilization were armed with bow and arrow, tomahawk and lance, and rode without a saddle, we can count within the boun- daries of the Union almost every type of rider, from those who subdued the steed in the era Avhich produced the frieze of the Parthenon to the Sunday rider of the present year of grace. As a matter of pure skill, as well as artistically speaking, the first-named, or bareback rider, stands in every age at the head of all equestrians, while the latter is a proper object-lesson of what to avoid ; but, inasmuch as for practical work the saddle gives a distinct superiority in many ways, we can scarcely compare the bareback horseman with the modern rider, be he good, bad, or in- different. When we speak of bareback riding, we do not refer to the country bumpkin, a species indigenous to every soil, and most aptly illustrated in Rosa Bonheur's " Horse Fair." Especially w^iere horses trot is this bareback horror at his worst. Leaning back, holding for dear life to the reins Avhich give him a good half of his security, with elbows in air, or marking time to the horse's steps, and with a general appearance of a set purpose to contend with the ■ A COUNTRY BUMPKIN impossible to the end of the chapter, this rider is the very pattern of how not to do it. Take the rider on the big gray in the " Horse Fair," and compare him with one of the riders in the Panathenaic procession ! How can two men doing the same thing be so at odds ? And yet each would cast a slur at the other's horsemanship. Qui i excuse s'accuse, and I do not wish to offer an apol- ogy for what, in the following pages, may often on the surface appear to be dogmatic. I hope that my brothers in horsemanship will absolve me from narrowness — in all things easily the first of vices. I have put a girdle round the earth ; I have ridden with all kinds and conditions of men, from Mexican vacjuero to Arab sheik ; I have thrown my leg across every species of mount, from a bronco to a ARTISTIC RIDING 3 bridle-bullock; I have discussed horse -lore in the great mmieges of Europe and on the Syrian desert, and I equally love to ride my pet horse and my hobby. You may dis- agree with me, my brother rider, but let us argue together. I will say my say now, and then you shall have your turn. I shall expect to learn much from you. ]S'o intelligent horseman ever claims for his own method the a and w of equitation. It is an axiom among all men who are not hide-bound by prejudice that the method of riding, and the bit and saddle which are best adapted to the animal to be ridden, to the needs of the work to be done, and to the climate, will, barring poverty of resources, be the ones to grow into use among all peoples and every class. This fact is well illustrated by the two almost PANATHENAIC RIDER 4 DIPTERENT STYLES extreme seats ©f the cowboy and the fox -hunter. The cowboy lias ta be astride his ponies from a dozen hours upwards every day, ropes steers, or drags out mired cows ; has to stick to his saddle under the most abnormal con- ditions, and must if need be have both his hands at liberty. He rides with a short tree, horn pommel, and high cantle. He laughs at any other rig. The fox-hunter has nothing to do but to keep his seat ; he has no occupation for his hands except by the play of the bits to get the very best performance out of his horse — a delicate enough operation by-the-bye, and not to be quickly acquired — and needs a saddle on which he can not only sit safely and comforta- bly over difficult obstacles, but which is convenient to fall out of if a horse comes down, and will prove the least dan- gerous should his horse come atop of him. He rides the flattest thing known except a pad. The very best author- ity obtainable — those men, to wit, who have done duty as cowboys, and have ridden to hounds as well (and many of us know from personal friendship that a man may be equally distinguished on the ranch, Avith the Meadow Brooks, and in politics and letters, too) — unite in pronounc- ing each saddle to be as closely adapted to the needs of each rider as it can be made. Long use will extract what is good from every style. Even the Arab, who would laugh to scorn the long stirrups of the cowbvoy, or the per- sistent road-trot of the fox-hunter, rides in a fashion which to us seems at first blush inexplicable, but which, when one has long dwelt among them, is found to be by no means ill-adapted to his needs. His entire rig suits the Arabian he rides vastly better than a flat English saddle would do, which latter, indeed, he deems the product of the always more or less insane Frank. Leavins: out the soldier, who is the lineal descendant of the knight in armor, with seat and saddle modifled by his THE BEST RIDER? 5 more modern weapons and equipment, and who is every- where — barring some national traits — substantially the same, the home of the short seat and long stirrup is the Occident, that of the long seat and short stirrup the Orient ; and these are varied in every locality to suit its own peculiarities, inherited or acquired. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but they only serve to prove it. Midway comes the Englishman, with his numerous civil- ized imitators, whose seat is a compromise between the long and the short. All other styles approach more or less to these, and each has, among the prejudiced, its un- compromising advocates. But whatever seat may be be- lieved by its partisans to be the best, there are, after all said, so many unsurpassed riders who break every com- mandment in the civilized decalogue of equitation that we cannot even ask " Who is the best rider ?" but only "What is the best form for the peculiar wants of each of us, or of our climate, roads, and horses ?" II Xenophox, whose work on horsemanship is the earliest which has been preserved to us, gives to some of our eques- trians a commendable example by praising Simo, who had preceded him, and perhaps cut him out, in writing a horse- book. " "We shall expect," says he, " to acquire additional credit, since he who was skilled in horses has the same notions with us." It is everywhere a good deal the fash- ion, and in some places a matter of faith, to claim that some particular brand of horsemen, as of cigars or whis- key, is the best; or, rather, that there can be no other really perfect brand. But this is a provincial trick. Whoso, like Odysseus, has seen men and cities, knows that there are everywhere equally good liquor, tobacco, and riders. By-the-wa}^, the author as well as the genius of the Anabasis was one of the most thorough of horsemen. Let me commend his "Horse Book" to your reading. You will find in fifty pages more horse sense than, I fear, there may be found between even these covers. And it serves to prove that man and horse have not much varied through tlie many centuries since this Yankee of a Greek marched through trials to the sea. Apart from geological evidences, in which we riders of to-day are not as deeply interested as wo might be, the Orient was the original home of horsemen, and war was the early training-school of the horse. Tliough this most useful of quadrupeds appears first in histor}'^ and monu- mental record as a beast of burden, and thouoli ridins' THE HORSE IN WAR 7 must be assumed to have preceded driving, there is evi- dence to show that chariots in great numbers were em- ployed in war before cavalry came into common use. In the first home of the horse, his utility was all but limited to war ; camels were the freight-carriers on a large, asses on a small, scale ; bullocks were as much a usual means of passenger transportation as camels ; and they were no doubt then, as now in parts of the Orient, steady and rapid travellers. E"o one who has not seen the trotting bullock has any idea of how fine a driver he is; as well bred as a racer, as quiet as the traditional (not the actual) lamb, he will go his forty miles in seven or eight hours to your entire satisfaction. But the bullock was of no use in war. He was lacking in character as much as his brother the bull was ungovernable. The utility of the horse as an adjunct to armed man soon impressed itself on his owner. The higher the warrior could tower above the common herd of soldiery, the more terrible his aspect, and the deadlier his aim with lance and arrow. To fight from above downward was always the desideratum in the days of short -carry jactile weapons; and from this ambition came the steed's early appearance in battle. But to debase him to the purposes of pleasure was, for many generations after he became an e very-day matter, never dreamed of. He was altogether too noble an animal ; and we can well imagine that he impressed himself upon the ancients with the same force he exerts on us. We find the very best of cavalry in ancient times. The Greeks ran against a very serious problem in the Persian light horse when they first trod the soil of Asia Minor. While the best infantry in existence, they in nowise com- pared as horsemen with the Asiatics until Alexander s Companion Cavalry showed them what good material and intelligent drill would do. But Alexander's methods were 8 SADDLES forirotten, and the Greek and Koman cavalry for centn- ries after his day remained less apt than that of their barbarian neighbors. It was Philip of Macedon who had first utilized the excellent little chunk of the Thessalian plains, and organized the Companion Cavalry, which his splendid son so divinely led, and which, to judge from its manoeuvres and fighting, must have consisted of the most admirable horsemen. The ancients all rode without sad- dle or stirrups, on a blanket, or on a pad, or bareback, and in spite of this fact, or perhaps by reason of it, rode extremely well. The origin and era of the first saddles is hard to trace. Some authorities strive to prove the existence of a saddle- tree several centuries before the Christian era. The an- cient Gauls unquestionably used a tree. This is shown by some small terra-cotta figures found in France, dating back to the early centuries of our era. But we know that the Greeks did not habitually use a saddle. It is wonderful what feats of military horsemanship the bareback rider could perform in the age of what we might call gymnastic equestrianism. Nothing but the personal knowledge of what our old-time Indian could do enables us to credit the historical accounts of the Greek's agility and skill. They were simply wonderful. The weapons he carried, his heavy armor, his baggage, all appear to THE KNIGHT IN ARMOR 9 handicap him beyond possibility of marching or fighting bareback; and yet we know that Alexander covered an extraordinary distance in his pursuit of Darius ; and Ar- rian tells us enough to determine beyond a peradventure that no cavalry has ever been fought au fond as were the Companions under the son of Philip at the Hydaspes. But this was owing primarily to the Achillean fury of xllexander. "When, after the lapse of centuries, saddles came into common use, there grew up two schools of riding — that of the mailed warrior, whose iron armor well chimed in with his "tongs on a wall" seat in his peaked saddle, and that of the Oriental, whose nose and knees all but touched. The former was not what we really call a horseman ; he was a mere man on horseback. That some of them were noble-looking specimens is vouched for by, say, the statue of Bartolomeo CoUeoni, in Venice, easily best of eques- trian figures, and surely a splendid ideal in many ways. But the horse was more of a lumbering vehicle than a saddle-beast, a species of conveyance — a gun-carriage, so to speak — for the bulky man of iron, wdio could no more walk than ride, and when unhorsed was as useless as a dismounted gun. Why the Eastern rider, who is at the other end of the category, and really a horseman, should cling to his extremely short leathers it is hard to say, un- less it be from the same ancient motive — to place him the higher above his horse, and therefore make him the more imposing when he stands up in his stirrups to bran- dish scimitar or matchlock. Yet he is a wonderful rider, this same Oriental; as we shall see when we reach his habitat / and so indeed is every man, whatever his style, who from youth up is the companion of the horse. This peculiar type — to come back to our original statement — does not exist in North America, though some of our Ind- 10 AMERICAN VARIETY ians ride with very short stirrups, and in a manner in some points not unhke the Arab of to-day. But every other style of equitation is found either among our abo- rigines, or in the thickly populated sections of our con- tinent. Ill The bareback rider was common among the plains Indians of forty years ago. Beyond trappings for mere show, the noble red man's pony was as naked as he. The bareback seat ought in theory to be alike in all ages, va- ried slightly only by the conformation of man and beast — the slimmer the horse's barrel, or the longer the man's legs, the straighter the seat. We are wont to ascribe vari- ations from it to the use of saddles. This seat, in addi- tion to giving the balancing trick, is supposed to train a man to grip his horse from breech to knee, and, unless when making unusual exertions which require all the grip a man has at command, to allow his leg from the knee down to hang more or less perpendicularly. It is at all events distinctly the model from which to start. The less the variation from it the better the results. And although many horsemen who wander furthest from this seat achieve singular success in equitation, the model, nevertheless, re- mains the best. This is a maxim in every school in Eu- rope or America. Variations from the bareback seat are the result of peculiar habits or requirements. This is only theorizing, you may say. True, but the best practice comes from following out good theory, how- ever often practice alone may produce individual success. A man or a horse, or both combined, may accomplish as- tounding results in the wrong way ; but the same skill, patience, and labor, properly directed, would have accom- plished more. " Practice makes perfect," runs the old 12 BAREBACK RIDING saAT, but the word *' perfect " has a limited meaning. To be perfect in doing a thing incorrectly is a misapplication of endeavor, the more so if the thing done is per se useful. The average bareback rider of civilization is far from perfect. He pulls on his horse's mouth for dear life. If he quits his hold of the bridle or halter rope he is gone. He is, if any man, the typical three-legged rider — the very exemplar of what is vicious in the art. Good bareback riding, on the other hand, is one of the finest of perform- ances. Did you ever try it ? It is all very well so long as you have a bridle and a good tough mouth to hold on by ; but drop your bridle, fold your arms, and see what happens. If your horse knows you and you him, or if you have been there before, well and good ; but with a green beast, even if kind, you will find yourself all at sea ; and should you happen to have caught a Tartar, you will be sent to Coventry in short measure, to be a trifle mixed in metaphor. Now the old-time Indian did just what you find so diffi- cult. He needed both hands for other things than hold- ing on. When hunting, he must use his bow and arrow ; on the war-path still less could he spare a hand to his horse. He was a consummate rider, who, despite what •we call defects in style, could outdo in his way any rider who exists to-day. There are, of course, many things which only a man in a saddle can undertake; but that by no means makes him the better rider. We must yield the palm to the bareback seat. What we have said of our old-time Indian applies with equal force to the cavalryman of antiquity. Livy aptly divides cavalry into " those with and those without the bridle," meaning regular and irregular horse. The former were the heavy horsemen. The latter guided their horses with voice or legs, or with a slender rod. " The Numid- EQUINE INTELLIGENCE 13 ians, a nation ignorant of the rein, whose horses the Avand, sportively waved over their ear, directs with not less ef- fect than the bit," sings Silius Italicus, in a key which yields us a pretty bit of information. To those who have never ridden in the ranks it would seem as if horses could not be managed without bit and rein ; but, in truth, if left to themselves and well trained, cavalry horses de- velop an intelligence unmatched in any other pursuit, and an ability to act together in the right direction which is marvellous. How many victories are due to this equine instinct only the heau sahreur can know. lY We have from all sources accurate and consistent ac- counts of the extraordinary riding of the old savage. Catlin and Parkman and Dodge depict him fully. A piece of buffalo-robe girthed with a rope over the pony's back stood in lieu of saddle, if even so much was used ; a cord of twisted hair lashed round its lower jaw served both for bit and bridle, "When hunting, in fact as a rule, the Indian wore naught but a breech-cloth and moccasins — not to lay stress on paint and feathers — and carried a buffalo-skin, which he threw around his shoulders or let fall from about his waist. He was often a splendid speci- men of manly strength and activity — this old-time Indian. "By G , a Mohawk !" exclaimed Benjamin West, when he first beheld the Apollo Belvedere. A heavy whip with elk-horn handle and knotted bull's -hide lash hung by a loop to the Indian's wrist. His bow and arrows gave full occupation to his hands ; he was forced to guide his pony with legs and word alone, and to rely on its intelligence and the training he had given it to do the right thing at the right moment. Thus slenderly equipped, this superb rider dashed into the midst of a herd of buffaloes — a seeth- ing, tearing, volcanic mass of motion, of Avhich no one who has not seen it can conceive an idea ; but so quick was the pony and so strong the seat of his master, that, despite the stampede of the terror-stricken herd and the charges of the enraged and wounded bulls, few accidents ever occurred. The Indian on horseback has ninety lives, 4 INDIAN TRAINING 17 not nine. His riding is not an art, it is nature. The cow- hoy has a task to tax the stoutest when he rides into a stampeded herd of cattle ; but the cowboy has saddle and bridle-arm, the Indian had neither. The Indian has never developed a system of training his ponies. Each man taught his own to suit himself, and except under imitation of some chief who had exceptional success in training his ponies, or a certain trick perhaps shown by father to son and thus perpetuated, there was none but individual knack in his horsemanship. The plains pony was quickly taught after a rough-and-ready fashion, more by cruelty than kindness ; in a manner, in fact, as different from the system of the Arab as the fine shape of the horse of the desert as we see him in pictures differs from the rugged outline of the bronco as we see him in reality. All horses are more intelligent than man supposes ; those most with men, or on which man most depends, most readily respond to training; and the Ind- ian and his pony were every day and all day comrades. Before the Indian could trade for or steal a bit, he always used the jaw-rope — or nothing. AVith the rope in the left hand, he bore against the neck to turn to one side, and gave a pull to turn to the other ; or else he shifted his pony's croup by a more or less vigorous kick with either heel. When both his hands were busy, he relied entirely upon his legs and the pony's knowledge of the business in hand ; but as every Indian digs his heels into the horse's flanks and lashes him with the quirt at every stride, it is hard to see how the pony caught on to his meaning. The more credit to the quadruped. This method of the Indian is nothing new. You find the same thing among all tribes on whose territory the horse is indigenous. Historically we know that the Nu- midians, several centuries before the Christian era, had 2 18 INDIAN FEATS the same success with their steppes ponies ; that the Par- thians, long before the Greeks came in contact with them, were riders of equal merit. To-day all natives of those lands where the horse is bred are practically what our Ind- ian was, with whatever differences their respective na- tional traits may have developed. The riding feats of the Indian of to-day, such as shoot- ing, casting the lasso, or picking objects off the ground at a gallop, or hanging to one side of his horse, concealed all but an arm and leg, while he shoots at his enemy from behind the running rampart, were equally performed by his bareback ancestor. The latter was wont to braid his mustang's mane into a long loop through which he could thrust his arm to prjeserve his balance, but he had not the advantage of the cantle to hold to by his leg. The only representative of such cleverness to-day is to be found in the sawdust arena ; not many decades ago, every third Indian could have given odds to the best of circus per- formers. The old bareback Indian rider has disappeared ; it needed but a short contact with civilization to show him the manifest advantages of bit and saddle. As the old men died off, the young bucks took to the tricks of the white man, quite as much from fashion as from an ability to put them to use. Whoso killed a pale-face would ride his saddle — galls or no galls to horse and man — as a matter of pure boasting; whoso could not get a rig by killing a pale-face was not happy until he stole one. And thus the fine old bareback trick was lost. It is to be regretted that we can make no satisfactory comparison between the bareback rider of ancient times and our own Indian of the past generation. There are many men yet living to testify to the skill and strength of the Indian horseman ; and Catlin has left us numerous pictures of the savage. But of the ancient rider we have ALEXANDER'S STATUE 19 in monumental and ceramic art few except very crude pictorial delineations, and in books yet fewer written ones, and it would not be easy to reproduce him were it not for a few works of exceptional art which remain to us. One of the most precious relics of the past is a bronze statuette dug up at Herculaneum in 1751, and thought to be a copy of the equestrian statue known to have been made of Alexander the Great by Lysippus, after the battle of the STATUE OP ALEXANDER BY LYSIPPUS Granicus, when statues of all the brave who fell in this initial Greek victory were made by the famous sculptor. If it is truly a copy of Lysippus' work, we can judge from it how the Macedonians managed their horses in a hand- to-hand conflict. The Kino^ is shown sittino; on a blanket firmly held in place by a breast-strap and girth ; without dropping the reins from his bridle hand he grasps this 20 SEVERE SPURRING substitute for a saddle at the withers, and turning fully half-wa}^ to the right and looking backward, gives a swing- ing cut with his sword to the rear, covering as big an arc of the circle as the best swordsman who ever sat in a sad- dle-tree. The statue is full of life, and natural to a degree. If not Lysippus' work, it is that of a consummate artist. The position shows great freedom of movement on the horse, and a seat strong and elastic. That the Macedo- nians kept their heels well away from the horse's flanks, or rather that they did not rely on their heels to cling to him, is shown by their commonly wearing spurs, a thing the Indian is wont to avoid ; and the same habit shows clearly in this piece of art. And yet this does not prove much, perhaps. Our hunt- ing-men wear spurs, and are supposed to keep them for the proper moment ; still, whenever one chances to be photographed leaping an obstacle, even if only two feet high, you may see him with a good part of his glue resi- dent in his heels. " Cruelty to animals !" you exclaim. Yes, but in the excitement of the moment the horse, brave, generous beast, has scarcely noticed the pain. So closely does the horse partake of the rider's enthusiasm and purpose that the high -school horse, in the airs re- quiring great vigor, will calmly receive a severe applica- tion of the spur as an indication of the thing he is ex- pected to do, and this without the least resentment. AVhen riding merely and not lighting, the Greek sat on his breech in a natural position, took a firm hold with his thighs, but let his legs from the knee down hang free. His attitude, as shown in the Panathenaic procession on the frieze of the Parthenon, was singularly graceful in style ; and that it was the common one is to be seen from Xenophon's rules for keeping the seat. He managed the reins with light and easy hands. The Indian, on the con- GOOD STYLE 21 traiy, to judge from the pictures we have of him, was as singularly awkward and ungainly. He sat on his crotch, leaned forward, with the thigh not far from perpendicu- lar and the leg thrust back at almost a right angle. This he could do with the plains pony, whose barrel was far from as well rounded as that of the Thessalian chunk; and he got a goodly part of his grip from his calf and heel. The contrast between the statue of Alexander, or one of the Parthenon riders, and any one of Catlin's pictures is striking ; but we must remember that the former are the production of the ablest Greek sculptors, in the high- est bloom of art, under the personal direction of Phidias ; while the latter pretend only to convey the idea of the savage as he was ; and though the old-time Indian was the equal, probably the superior, as a mere rider, of the Greek, it is the latter whom we must select as a model if we wish to preserve any semblance of beauty in eques- trianism. And we may no more properly banish the idea of beauty from our habits of riding than from any other act of our daily life. As a rule, clever performance is as- sociated with what commends itself to the eye ; what we call style is often solely able performance ; but no one can watch the ungainly fad of swinging the legs or raising the elbows without a desire to send the rider to school — to the Elgin Marbles. It is no wonder that the Indian rode weU. Before he could walk, or talk, or remember, the lad had been tum- bled into a parfleche with a lot of puppies or tepee stuff, and had travelled scores of miles a day ; he had later been tied to a horse, or been set astride his neck, and told to hold on by the mane, or fall off and be left behind ; and no Indian can recollect the time when he could not ride anything and everything which came along. The old knightly training — and why does it not, broadly construed, cover all that one wants to know ? — to ride and fence and speak the truth, was carried out for two-thirds its value by the Indian. They could ride, and they could use their weapons. The boys from twelve years up do most of the herding among all Indian nations, and m this occupation the}" become familiar with every pony in the tribe. It is probable that the lads have roped and mounted in suc- cession every one intrusted to their care, and have learned its individual qualities, while gaining in general horse- manship. Even to-day the Indian always races bareback. His saddle weighs far too much, and he himself does not train down like our jockeys, except when he is starved on the war-path, and racing is a pastime of peace ; so that at the starting-post he strips off all he can from both his horse and his own person. He is keenly fond of speed-matches, and is up to every known and unknown trick of gambling or -jockeying. He can give long odds to the best race- STRENGTH OF INDIANS 23 track shark, and the sorrier he can make his pony look, if he knows he has speed, the better he is pleased. His pony will, of course, beat a thorough-bred at short dis- tances ; any pony can. He is half down the track before the racer has got his stride. At a mile or two miles the tables are turned, though there are many Avho insist that the bronco is the better at a ten or twenty mile gallop. This opinion is, I think, founded on an intimate knowl- edge of the bronco, but a lack of intimacy with the thor- ough-bred. In the late Berlin -Vienna ride the ponies came in with less apparent injury ; but they W' ere not the winners — and many other factors came into play. The Indian does not rank high in beauty, strength, or endurance. There have been tribes in America which produced the finest of specimens ; but if we read Parkman carefully we shall find the Indian of two hundred years ago much what he is to-day, bar a few nasty white man's tricks, learned to the eternal disgrace of the latter. While wonderfully agile and Avith the fortitude which all wild tribes possess, the Indian lacks the strength of our ath- letes ; and in boxing or wrestling, even after a course of instruction, would be no match for an average American. A Sullivan — or rather a Corbett — could knock out two- score of them, " one down t'other come on." But for all that the Indian can perform equestrian feats which strike us as wonderful enough. It is a point of honor with him, as it was with the ancients and is still among many peo- ples, not to leave his dead or wounded in the hands of the enemy, liable to butchery or deprived of the rites of bur- ial ; and he will pick up a warrior from the ground with- out dismounting, almost without slacking speed, throw him across his pony and gallop off. This requires and receives much practice. Sometimes two act together in picking up the man, but one is quite able to accomplish it. 24 THE "COUP" A buck represents the dead or wounded. He lies per- fectly still and limp if the former, or aids as far as is con- sistent with his supposed hurt if the latter. It is rather rough handling he has to undergo, but by no means as rough as one sees in some of our favorite sports — say, foot-ball. Perhaps this is the best of the numerous feats the Indian can exhibit ; but Dodge and Parkman tell us of many others. When I refer to Dodge, I mean Colonel Eichard Irving Dodge, of the Army — a soldier, a sports- man, and an author, partaking of the virtues of each pro- fession, and — well, I cannot say more an I would. Francis Parkman's unequalled knowledge of the Indian in our his- tory is acknowledged in every part of the civilized world. The Indians would be capable of making a superb irreg- ular cavalry were it not for the divided authority from which all tribes suffer. There is no central power, no influence to hold the individuals to anything like what we call duty. The recent efforts to enlist Indians have not proven successful. Capable of immense exertion un- der circumstances which arouse his fanaticism, he is yet at heart a lazy brute, and when he has once sated his pas- sion for adornment by wearing Uncle Sam's uniform for a few months, his greed for ease overcomes all sense of discipline, and he relapses into the indolent savage, of practically little use in any line but politics. Yet among themselves they have a certain organization, and in battle are able to execute a number of manoeuvres, all, however, weakened by the lack of the one controlling hand. Nor can the Indian be easily kept in the ranks. In order to claim a scalp, the warrior must give the dead man the coujp. This was in olden times a stab with a Aveapon, but Indians now have what are called coup sticks. Whoever first strikes the victim the coup can rightfully claim the scalp, and no authority known to his savage instincts can "PENELOPE" 25 keep an Indian in the ranks when there is a scalp at stake. The fact that an occasional Indian turns out trustworthy merely furnishes the exception which proves the rule. The Indians of to-day show a certain similarity in their style of riding to those of the last generation, so far as the constant use of the whip and heels is concerned, but the saddle has completely changed their seat, and the dif- ferent tribes differ as greatly among themselves as saddle- riding does from the bareback. All Indians ride well. Living in the saddle, breaking wild ponies, and using half- trained ones at all times, they cannot help being expert horsemen. They remind me of the old horse-lover who once examined a fine mare I was riding — it was "Penel- ope." "She's a good mare. Deacon Dyer," said I. "That 'ere mare," replied he, after looking her all over with a true horseman's delight, and stopping in front of her to give one more look into her broad, handsome, courageous face — " that 'ere mare can't help but be a good un." So with the Indian ; but most of them ride in so ungainly a manner as to be hard to describe to one who has not seen them. The first point of difference between them and the civ- ilized rider which is apt to be brought home to a tender- foot turns on the fact that the Indian always mounts from the off side. This was a common habit also of remote antiquity, though Xenophon teaches you how to mount from the near side. Perhaps the habit came from the same cause — that the lance or other weapon was naturally held in the right hand, and could not readily be thrown over the animal without fright or injury. The Greeks had a small loop on the shank of the lance, into which they thrust their right foot in order to swing themselves up on their horse. They had no weapons dangling from their waist to interfere with free action. But the long. 26 MOUNTING ON OFF SIDE strap-hung sword of the mediteval cavalry soldier com- pelled hmi to mount on the near side, and as he is the pattern from which we moderns have been cast the habit has survived. The average rider will be apt to deny that the soldier is the prototype of the modern horseman ; but every rid- ing-school maxim is a distinct inheritance from the caval- ryman of auld lang-syne ; and only he who has learned to ride, as it w^ere, au nattirel^ can be free from these. Even then imitation of or association w4th those who have rid- den in a school will lend some of this color to his style. To revert to our text, the white man who attempts to mount an Indian pony in our fashion is very apt to get a nasty spill before he h^s reached his back, for at the unu- sual attempt the half-trained beast will be apt to fly the track with a quickness wdiich the ordinary " American " horse could in nowise rival. He is not so easily managed either, this same pony. He is tractable and clever in his w^ay, but his w^ay is not our w^ay ; and he must indeed be a fairly good rough-rider who, once mounted on a fresh and vigorous Indian pony, does not part company with him before he has covered many miles of sharpish riding or hunting. YI The old-time Sioux was one of the earliest of the sad- dle-riding Indians. He was to be met witli on the North- ern plains some forty years ago. He managed his pony with a stick or the hereditary jaw-rope, and this when not in use he was wont to throw over the pony's neck, whence it would shortly fall and trail along the ground. But the pony never minded so small a thing. So well was he used to a rope thus trailing that he never blun- dered on it. This seems odd ; but if you will study the clever way in which a horse will avoid the stones in the road he is travelling over, by stepping slightly within or beyond them, or on this or that side of them, all the while apparently paying heed to other things, you will see how naturally he may avoid treading on a trailing rope. A horse is apt to get his leg caught in a bridle, because it has two reins buckled together, but scarcely in a halter- rope if he breaks loose from you. The home-made saddle of the old-time Sioux was con- structed of a wooden or sometimes an elkhorn framework. The side pieces were well apart, and were held to the arches by the most ancient practice of shrinking rawhide upon them. No one who has not used it has any idea of how firmly rawhide will hold two such pieces together. A broken wagon-tongue wrapped with rawhide is as good as new — better. The pommel and cantle of the Sioux's saddle were very much alike ; both rose perpendicularly from the arch of the tree to a height of sometimes eighteen 28 THE SIOUX'S SEAT inches. There was no regulation pattern to them ; each saddle was separately made, and constructed and orna- mented according to the momentary taste and fancy of the maker, or according to the materials at hand. It was not a saddle of commerce. The bent-Avood stirrups were lashed in straps also cut from rawhide, slung loosely on the side pieces, and work- ing back and forth into all conceivable positions. Such a trifle as ill -hung stirrups the Sioux never heeded. His seat was not so easily disturbed as a city swell's by one hole difference in his leathers. It was generally imma- terial to him whether he had any stirrups at all. His seat was peculiar. His leg from crotch to knee gripped in an almost perpendicular position ; from the knee down it was thrown sharply back, so that his weight was sus- tained solely ou the crotch and the muscles of the thighs. As a consequence of this seat, he pounded in his saddle like a fresh recruit when riding anything but a rack or lope, leaned forward like a modern track-jockey at a hand-gal- lop, and stuck his heels into his pony's flanks for a hold. This matter of holding on by the heels is almost univer- sal among riders not civilized into the soldier's method above referred to. Nine-tenths of the daily riders of the world hold on by the calf and heel. How the Sioux could ride as he did and escape injury from the pommel is a mystery. But though smashing to atoms all the maxims of equitation, ancient or modern, the old-time Sioux was a good rider, and his seat Avas strong and effective. It has been referred to as ungainly ; but in a certain sense, no really strong seat can be such. Noteworthy ability is generally h.a,ndsome per se. This sav^age tricked up his pony's mane and tail and forelock with feathers, beads, or scrips of gaudy cloth, and on occasion painted him all over with a colored clay, A SIOUX DUDE 29 very much as the Hindoo will daub red spots of paint all over a white horse, or dj^e his tail pea -green. In his fashion the Sioux was as much of a dude as if he wore a three-inch collar and a big-headed cane, or shook hands with elbow in the air, and was a singularly picturesque horseman, if not one who would appeal to the eye of a park-rider. YII America has been full of picturesque characters. Even the Orient to-day, which is much what it has always been, has no more of the odd and interesting than we have had. Civilization {L e. newspapers, railroads, and telegraphs) brings us down to one pattern. Ready-made clothing is the archenemy of the graceful and appropriate — the de- mon in art. No greater advance in mechanics was ever made than that of building arms, machines, and tools to scale, and that of duplicate parts. But people nowadays are all duplicate parts, and while it Avorks well in mechan- ics, it destroys originality and beauty in the human race. When you consider what our early frontier population was ; what energy, intelligence, and pluck resided in the men who went out beyond "the settlements" into the habitat of the red man to hunt or trap, we can surely boast a more wonderful, and actually more picturesque set of actors on tlie stage of American history than can be found in any other land. Among these was the trapper. Some of the largest cities on the American continent — St. Louis, as an in- stance — may be said to have been built from the profits of the fur trade. There had been stray trappers and small dealers from the earliest days ; but the first man who dis- covered the immense extent to which the peltry traffic could be carried was a rover of broad views, who most likely hailed from Kentucky or Missouri, was of French or Scotch- Irish descent, and perchance came from the PICTURESQUE AMERICANS 33 blood which crossed the Alleghanies in the footsteps of Daniel Boone, intent on adventure or flying from civili- zation. The white trapper was as averse to association with his fellow-man as the hardiest of the old pioneers ; in fact, he often fled the settlements for good and suflicient cause. He was not so much of a misanthrope as he was a law-breaker ; but it is said that many had fled from the irate importunities of their respective Xanthippes. It will not do to class this trapper among the Ishmaels; many were pushed out beyond the frontier by their love of ad- venture and expectation of gain, and were as blameless in their lives as they were courageous in their calling. But it is also a fact that many of these hardy fellows preferred to live in a country where there was no sheriff to molest nor deputy to make them afraid. The white trapper has now all but died out with the buffalo, though a genera- tion ago he was a common enouo^h character in the terri- tories north of Colorado. His descendants have mostly turned cow-punchers. This famous hunter was a character more practical than poetic, though he has been made the subject of many fine phrases and the hero of many exaggerated situations. His unkempt hair and beard floated long and loose from under his coyote cap, and he had lived so continuously with the Indians that he had largely adopted their dress and their manners — could, if need be, live on the same chuck, and always had one or more squaws. He was apt to carry a trade-gun — perhaps a good one, perhaps an old Brown Bess cut down. At his side was slung an enormous pow- der-horn, for in the old days he could not so readily re- plenish his supply, far from civilization as he was wont to be. He rode a Mexican saddle, for w^hich he had traded skins, or maybe stolen, and from which he had cut every strip of superfluous leather, as the Indian does to-day. .3 34 OUR REAL FRIENDS He rode tlie same pon}^ as his Indian competitor in the trade, but \Yith the seat adapted to a saddle rather than a pad, and still retaining a flavor of the settlements despite his divorce from their ways. In fact, a white man on the plains never quite acquires the redskin habit. He can to- day be told from an Indian as far as he can be seen by his style of riding, and it was no doubt always so. Nor had this trapper lost his pale-face instincts so entirely as to indulge in the Indian's usual atrocious cruelty to his horse. He can scarcely be said to have had the feelings of a member of the society with the exuberantly long name and truly benevolent method ; but he had the sense to see the commercial value of the care he might bestow on his rough-and-ready companion, and at least treated him with common consideration. This the good little fellow repaid with a love and unselfish devotion which only an animal can show. Eight here and now I would fain pour out my heart-felt admiration for the truest of our four-footed friends, our dogs and horses. Have you never had a horse, my brother, to whom you told your secrets and your griefs ? Have you never had a dog who was to you ev^en as a child, for whom you wept bitter tears and honest when you had laid him at rest in some quiet spot, hallowed alone by his virtues and your sorrow ; who, for his short term of years had grown into your very inmost heart by his faithful love, his unswerving loyalty, his spotless truth of character? If not, turn this page, read no more. But if you have ever given your affection to such a loving creature, if you have ever held his head between your hands and looked long and deep down into his tender, earnest eyes, in which lurks no thought of treachery, no ideal but yourself, which view you with a pathetic trustfulness of which you know you ai-(} not worthy, then, my brother, join me in laying PICCOLA 35 on his grave a ■wreath of everlasting, and thank God that you have known that truth and honor and pure faith which we weaklings of so-called civilization have lost in our efforts to grasp a higher good not half so well worth seeking. Truly the poor Indian was right in believing that he should share the company of his faithful friend when both should be translated to that equal sky ! If the hereafter is to be filled with the good we have known, will not many of us ask that such friends as these may be there ? I am humbly conscious that, if honest purpose and loyalty to her ideal be the test, there is certainly one dog I have owned who should enter the gates in advance of her master, strive he never so well for what is upright. I am not so sure that she had not a soul — that she is not Avaiting for me now", even as she used to do when I went away from home. Dear, loving, white -souled Piccola ! Many are the tears which the memory of thee hath evoked ! Though I live to the term when life is but labor and sor- row, thou shalt daily have thy meed of a tender thought. AVas not Buddha, indeed, a true prophet ? But that is an- other story. YIII The Indians were not long in finding out that peltries were a ready means of getting the guns and calico and fire-water of the white man, and the white trapper was not many years alone in the business. The Indian trap- per whom Remington's clever eye and hand have depicted may be a Cree or perhaps a Blackfoot, whom one was apt to run across in the Selkirk Mountains or elsewhere on the plains of the -British Territory, or well up north in the Rockies, somewhat antedating the outbreak of the Civil War. He was tributary to the Hudson Bay Com- pany, whose badge he wore in his blanket coat of English manufacture, which he had got in trade. AVherever you met this coat, you might place its wearer. He had bear- skin leggings, with surface cleverly seared into ornament- al patterns, and for the rest the usual Indian outfit. He rode a pony which had nothing to distinguish it from the plains pony, except that in winter its coat grew to so re- markable a length as almost to conceal the identity of the animal. Unless you saw it in motion you might take it for a huge species of bear — with a tail. Such long coats are not uncommon among any breed of horses. We are wont to imagine that the Arabian always has a bright, glossy coat ; but during the chill rainy season of the regions north of the Arabian desert — and it can be as bleak and cold on those treeless wastes as heart can desire — the Arabian puts on a coat all but as long and rough as a sheep. Unlike the Indian's pony, he AN INDIAN TKAPPER PAD RIDING 39 gets fed during the severe season, for his master is not quite so improvident as the red man ; and he does not get so gaunt and miserable as his transatlantic cousin. But, like the bronco, it takes but a week or so of grass to scour him out into a coat as sleek as that of a race-track favorite. The Indian trapper rode a pad which was not unlike an air-cushion, cinched in place and provided with a pair of very short stirrups hung exactly from the middle. This drag'o:ed his heels to the rear, in the fashion of the old- time Sioux, and gave him a very awkward look. By just what process, from a bareback seat, the fellow managed to drift into this one, which is quite peculiar to himself, it is hard to guess. Habits change by slow degrees, and each step is wont to bring a new condition somewhat re- sembling its predecessor. Here we have a seat which has wandered as far from the bareback as one can ^vell imag- ine, and this in a comparatively short period. Among civilized peoples a novel invention may often immediately change a given method of doing a thing ; among savages changes are very gradual ; among semi-civilized peoples change is so slow that one may almost say that it never occurs. Unlike the old-time Sioux, the Indian trapper would sit all over his horse, weaving from side to side, and shift- ing his pad at every movement. His pony's back was always sore. His pad-lining soon got hard with sweat and galled the skin, and the last thing which w^ould ever occur to him would be to take steps to relieve his patient comrade's suffering. He never attempted to change his pad-lining or cinch the pad more carefully. On went the pad, up jumped the trapper ; and why shouldn't the pony buck, as he invariably did ? Sore backs are as much at the root of the bucking habit as the utterly insufficient breaking of the pony. 40 SORE BACKS This matter of sore backs furnishes a curious study. In every southern country outside of the United States, and among all wild or semi-civilized nations which are not peculiarly horse lovers, no heed whatever is paid to saddle or pack galls. The condition of the donkeys in the East, in Africa, or in Spain and Italy, is as lamentable as it is short-sighted. It never enters the minds of the owners of these patient brutes that a sore back is a commercial loss ; nor do they couple the idea of cruelty with dumb creatures at all. It is not until you reach Teutonic na- tions that both these ideas are extended so as to reduce the discomfort of animals to a minimum. This is not so odd ; one does not have to be so very old to remember the time when, even among us, calves were tied by all four legs and slung head down on their way to market ; when common pity never extended to ani- mals. Even to-day, not very far from home, one may find many breaches of the should - be commandment : " Thou shalt treat thy dumb servant as thou wouldst thy son." In those countries where the doctrine of transmi- gration has obtained a hold on the people, animals are better off ; one does not like to abuse a creature which may contain the soul of one's great-grandmother. But bad as the cruelty of neglect may be, an American Indian is perhaps more actively cruel to his pony than any other person. He never wears spurs, not even as a matter of vanity, for spurs would prevent his pounding his ])ony with his heels at every stride, as is his wont ; but he will ride him till he drops dead in his tracks, when there is no necessity of his making speed ; he will lash him to the raw ; he will even stick his knife into him to make him gallop faster, and an A]mclie will give his pony a dig with his knife from sheer malice when he dismounts. IX There is no horse superior to the bronco for endurance ; few are his equals. His only competitor in the equine race is his lowly cousin, the ass, of whom I shall say much anon. The bronco came by his toughness and grit natu- rally enough ; he got tlieni from tlie Spanish stoclc of Moorish descent, the individuals of whicli breed, aban- doned in American wilds in the sixteenth century by the early searchers for gold and for the Fountain of Youth, were his immediate ancestors ; and his hardy life has, by survival of the fittest, increased this endurance tenfold. He is not handsome. His middle-piece is distended by grass food ; it is so loosely joined to his quarters that one can scarcely understand where he gets his weight-carrying capacity, and his hip is very short. He has a hammer- head, partly due to the pronounced ewe-neck which all plains or steppes horses seem to acquire by their nomad life. He has a bit too much daylight under him, which shows his good blood as well as the fact that he has had generations of sharp and prolonged running to do. His legs are naturally perfect, rather light in muscle and slen- der in bone, but the bone is dense, the muscle of strong quality, and the sinews firm. Still, in an Indian's hands his legs finally give Avay at the knees from sharp stopping with a gag-bit, and curbs will start on his houghs, for a redskin will turn on a ten-cent piece. The ponv is naturally quick, but his master wants him to be quicker. His hunting and all his sports require work 42 BRONCO ENDURANCE which outdoes polo. One form of racing is to place two long parallel strips of buffalo-liide on the ground at an interval of but a few feet, and, starting from a distance, to ride up to these strips, cross the first, turn between the two, and gallop back to the starting-point. A fraction of a second lost on a turn loses the race. Until one thinks of \yhat it means, a twentieth part of a second is no great loss. But take two horses of equal speed in a hurdle race with twenty obstacles. One pauses at each hurdle just one-twentieth of a second ; the other flies his hurdles with- out a pause. This lost second means that he will be forty- five feet behind at the winning-post — four good lengths. Another Indian sport is to ride up to a log hung horizon- tally and just high enough to allow the pony but not the rider to get under, touch it, and return. If the pony is stopped too soon, the Indian loses time in touching the log ; if too late, he gets scraped off. The sudden jerking of the pony on its haunches is sure eventually both to start curbs or spavin, and to break his knees. Still the pony retains wonderfully good legs considering. The toughness and strength of the plains pony can scarcely be exaggerated. lie will live through a winter that will kill the hardiest cattle. He worries through the long months when the snow has covered up the bunch- grass on a diet of cotton-wood boughs, which the Indian cuts down for him ; and though he emerges from this ordeal a pretty sorry specimen of a horse, it takes but a few weeks in the spring for him to get himself into splen- did condition and fit for the trials of the war-path. His fast has done Iiim good, as some say sea-sickness will do him good who goes down to the sea in ships. He can go unheard-of (Hstances. Colonel Hodge records an instance coming under his observation where a pony carried the mail three hundred miles in three consecutive nights, and OUR CLIMATE 43 back over the same road the next week, and kept this up for six months without loss of condition. He can carry any weight. Mr. Farkman speaks of a chief known as Le Cochon, on account of his three hundred pounds avoir- dupois, who, nevertheless, rode his ponies as bravely as a man of half the bulk. He as often carries two people as one. There is simply no end to this wonderful product of the prairies. He works many years. So long as he will fat up in the spring, his age is immaterial to the Indian. It has been claimed by some that the American climate is, ^ar excellence, adapted to the horse. California and Kentucky vie for superiority, and both produce such won- derful results as ''Sunol" and "Nancy Hanks." Man cer- tainly has done wonders with the horse upon our soil ; and alone the horse has done Avonders for himself. I have sought for great performances by horses in every land. One hears wonderful traditions of speed and endurance and much unsupported testimony elsewhere ; but for re- corded distance and time, America easily bears off the palm. We shall recur to this point hereafter. Ever since Brown- Sequard discovered that he could not always kill an Ameri- can rabbit by inserting a probe into its brain, and enunci- ated the doctrine of the superior energy and endurance of the American mammal, facts have been accumulating to prove his position sound. One peculiarity of the pony is his absence of crest. His ewe-neck suggests the curious query of what has become of the high, well-shaped neck of his ancestor the Barb. I was on the point of saying arched neck — but this is the one thing which the Arabian or Barb rarely has, being ridden with a bit which keeps his nose in the air. But he has a peculiarly fine neck and wide, deep, open throttle of perfect shape, and with bit and bridoon carries his head just right. There are two ways of accounting for the 44 EV7E-NECKS ewe-neck. The Indian's gag-bit, invariably applied with a jerk, throws up the pony's head instead of bringing it down, as the slow and light application of the school-curb will do, and this, it is thought by many, tends to develop the ewe-neck. But this is scarcely a theory which can be borne out by the facts, for the Arabian retains his fine crest under the same course of treatment. A more suffi- cient reason may be found in the fact that the starvation which the pony annually undergoes in the winter months tends to deplete him of every superfluous ounce of flesh wherever it may lie. The crest in the horse is mostly meat, and its annual depletion, never quite replaced, has finally brought down the Indian pony's neck nearer to the outline of the skeleton. It was with much ado under his scant diet that the pony held on to life during the winter ; he could not scrape together enough food to flesh up a merely ornamental appendage like a crest. Most Moors and Arabs, on the other hand, prize the beauty of the high- built neck, and breed for it ; and their steeds are far bet- ter fed. There is rarely snow where they dwell ; forage of some kind is to be had in the oases, and the master al- ways stores up some barley and straw for his steed ; or in case of need will starve his daughters to feed his mares. The Indian cares for his pony only for what he can do for him, and once lost, the crest would with difficulty be replaced, for few Indians have any conception of breeding. The bronco's mean crest is distressing, but it is in inv^erse ratio to his endurance and usefulness. Well fed and cared for, he will regain his crest to a marked extent. As we shall later see when we reach the land of the pure -bred Arabian, there are many more points of simi- larity than are generally sup])osed to exist between this steed of ro3^il lineage and his country cousin across the sea. Tlie city dwellers, or those who live near enough to AN ARABIAN BRONCO 45 the busy haunts of men to cater to the wants of the Franks who "have an e3"e for a horse," breed a well- rounded, up-headed fellow— the one we all see painted. But the real Arabian mare — the Anazeh — the progenitress of all that is fast and enduring, the worshipped of the sons of the Prophet, is quite another creature. She is for all the world like a small thorough-bred in training — or a bronco. But that, again, is another story. From one kind of bronco we will skip to another. The Indian must have transportation as well as riding ponies, and as the patient ass is the follower of Mohammed, so is the travaux (or trahieaii) pony to the Indian. It is hard to say which bears the most load according to his capac- ity, the donkey or the pony. On the whole, perhaps, weight for weight, the palm must be awarded to the ass ; but either earns what he gets with fourfold more right than his master. The burdens the ass bears in the Orient break him down to the extent of forgetting how to kick. Fancy driving even an overworked Kentucky mule by the tail, as they do the donkey in many parts of the East, and guiding him by a tweak of that appendage, close to his treacherous heels ! In a later chapter I shall sing peeans to this noblest of the equine race. The travaux pony is equally worked out of all idea of bucking. lie furnishes the sole means of transportation of the Indian camp, except sometimes a dog hitched to a diminutive trahieau, and managed — half for sport, half work — by a boy ; and, weight for weight, drags on his tepee-poles more than the best mule in Uncle Sam's serv- ice does on an army-wagon. When cam]) is broken, tlie squaws strip the tent-poles of tlieir l)uffal<) skin coverings, and it is these poles which furnish the wheels of the Ind- ian vehicle. Vehicle is, ]ierhaps, an odd term to us who make the word synonymous with rotary progression ; but vehicles on runners wre to-dav used at all seasons in numy iMtiii^ , . ;::HjiiiiiSiili THE TRAVAUX PONY TRAVAUX SADDLES 4^ parts of the Cumberhintl ^Mountains. They are of domes- tic manufacture, and are simply constructed of bent sap- lings lashed with green withes. As a rule, a cow or young steer is hitched singly into these sleds, which run with light loads all over the country — on mud roads in summer, and but for a short while on snow in midwinter. I have talked with old men in Eastern Kentucky who had never seen a wheel. That sounds odd, but it is true. The Blackfoot makes the neatest trappings for the tra- vaux ponies and pack-saddles. The pony is fitted with a huge leathern bag, heavily fringed and gaudy with red and blue flannel strips and beads of many colors. Over this goes the pack-saddle, ^vhich is not very dissimilar to tlie riding-saddle ; but it is of coarser build, and has a perpen- dicular pommel and cantle. In the pommel is a notch to receive one end of the tepee-poles, which are sometimes bound together two or three on each side, and, trailing past either flank of the pony, are held in place by two pieces of wood lashed to them just behind his tail and a. bit farther back. In the socket so made rides the par- fleche, a sort of rawhide trunk, and this receives the camp utensils — plunder, children, sometimes an old man or wom- an, puppies, and all the other camp impedimenta — while a squaw rides behind the pack-saddle on the pony, indif- ferently astride or sidewise, with her feet on the poles, and perhaps a youngster bestrides its neck. Thus laden, the wonderful little beast, which is rarely up to fourteen hands, plods along all day, covering unheard-of distances, and living on what bunch-grass he can pick up in spare mouients, with a mouthful of water now and again. There are apt to be several ponies to carry the plunder of the occupants of one tepee, and often one of them is loaded down with the rougher stufl^, while a second may be decked out with the finery and carry only one squaw — 4 50 SQUAW RIDERS particularly if she happens to be a new purchase and a favorite of the chief. A squaw is usually about as good a horseman as her buck, and rides his saddle or bareback with as much ease as a city woman rocks in her chair. She is often as plucky as he is. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find women in the fighting ranks, and doing a man's full duty ; and if the squaw does not often join her lord in the killing and capt- ure of the enemy, she can out-do him at all times in cru- elty to prisoners. Perhaps no human being is so fiendish in the pastime of torturing prisoners as an Indian squaw. She out-herods Herod in barbarity. XI The Comanche of the Fort Sill region is a good type of the Indian of to-day. He is the most expert horse- stealer on the plains, if we can credit the Indians them- selves, who yield to him the palm as a sneak thief — with them a title of honor rather than of reproach. There is no boldness or dash in his method, but he is all the more dangerous. The Indian has been much misconceived. It is not strange that many novelists should have taken him as the hero of their books ; few readers could check off their errors, and he was a new character who served as a vehicle for any number of qualities which might best fit into any given plot. But the red man has been as much overwrought as the Arabian horse. He is a brute, pure and simple, and has practically always been so. If you want the truth about him, consult people who have spent their lives among his ilk, not those who theorize on be- nevolent general principles at a judiciously safe distance. Read Our Wild Indians, and you will know more about him than most of those who think his vices are all attribu- table to the white man. Not that we can avoid responsibility for much that is evil in the red man — vile disease of body and mind and character ; but he is none the less a brute whose nature is a fit hot-bed for our worst vices. It is politics and dol- lars which have used him as a shuttlecock. The Indian problem is reducible to the simple question whether this broad land of ours is for the pale-face or the redskin. If, 52 INDIAN FOOD as elsewhere, civilization has here a right to extend the borders of its garments, the white man is responsible only for his excess of wrong — for the manner, not the fact of his taking-. This excess is no greater than that attribu- table to any other nation which seizes and civilizes a bar- barous land ; and, after all is said, the Indian is more sin- ning- than sinned against. He is and remains the most vicious brute the sun ever shone upon. The Comanche eats dog and horse flesh — as all Indians do more or less— and is by no means above a diet of skunk when other edibles fail him. Indeed, anything is chuck to the Indian in case of need, and while he has his bonne houche, it is, as a rule, quantity and not quality he seeks. The Comanche is fond of gay clothes, and has a trick of wrapping a sheet around his body, doubling in the ends, and letting the rest fall about his legs. This gives him the look of wearing the skirts or leg-gear of the Ori- ental. He uses a Texas cowboy's tree, a wooden stirrup, into which he thrusts his foot as far as a fox-hunter, and leathers even longer than the cowboy's, perhaps the long- est used by any rider. He is the only Indian who rides after this fashion. He, if any one, has the forked-radish seat. Between him and his saddle he packs all his extra blankets and most of his other plunder, so that he is some- times perched high abov^e his mount. For bridle and bit, he uses whatever he can beg, borrow, or steal. In one particular tlie Comanche is noteworthy. He knows more about a horse and horse-breeding than any other Indian. It strilces one as rather singular that the redskin has never developed an instinct for raising horses. And yet it is not strange. The conditions themselves have done so much for the bronco, and until of late years wild ponies liave been so easily procurable in unlimited numbers, that he has not yet been pushed into breeding. MODERN COMANCHE "PINTO" HORSES 55 And it is a rule with the red man not to do the unneces- sary. " Never do to-day what you can by any possibiHty put off till to-morrow " may be said to be his motto — ex- cept on the war-path. Is it alone his ? The Comanche is particularly wedded to and apt to ride a pinto ('' painted " or piebald) horse, and never keeps any but a pinto stallion. He chooses his ponies well, and shows more good sense in breeding- than one would give him credit for. The corollary to this is that he is far less cruel to his beasts, and though he begins to use them as yearlings, the ponies often last through many years. In this lie resembles his Oriental brother. Yearlings are very frequently seen under saddle among the Arabs. The Co- manche is capable of making as fine cavalry as exists, if subjected to discipline and carefully drilled. But the process may be difficult. XII The Apache of the present day is the exact reverse of the Comanche. His habitat is the Sierra Maclre Mount- ains in Arizona. He is not born and bred with horses, he knows little about them, and looks upon ponies as in- tended rather for food than for transportation or the war- path ; or, at all events, as ultimately destined for the cui- sine. He at times outdoes the Frenchman in hippophagy, for he will eat every one of his ponies during the winter, and rely upon stealing fresh ones in the spring. He and the Cheyenne are the most dashing of the Indian horse- thieves. He raids down in Chihuahua, where the va- queros raise stock for the Mexican army, and often drives off large numbers. When pursued, the Apaclie takes to the mountains, and is not infrequently compelled to aban- don his herd. But such is his expert boldness that he rarely lacks a supply at his neighbor's expense. ISTot con- tent with ponies, he steals his saddle and bridle in Mex- ico ; he wears spurs when he can get them to drive on his pony, and if these do not suffice to make him go his gait, he will goad him with a knife. The Apache is hideously cruel by nature, even more so than other Indians, if this were possible ; and his pony is often the sufferer. He takes no particular interest in liini. Except for his sum- mer's use and his winter's salt-junk, the pony has no fut- ure value. He takes a certain care of him only for the present value of the little fellow. In the mountains, where the sharp, flinty stones wear down the pony's unshod feet, M~iiih™a%^si^ RAWHIDE SHOES 59 this Indian will shrink rawhide over the hoofs in lieu of shoes, and this resists extremely well the attrition of the mountain paths. Arrian, of Nicomedia, tells us that the Macedonians, under Alexander, did the same to their cav- alry horses in the Hindoo Koosh, and no doubt the habit was much older than Alexander. On the whole, the Apache, quoad horses, is at the foot of the scale. There can be no comparative excellence to the Indian as a whole; it is comparative badness. In this, too, the Apache reaches the superlative. In what I say anent the Indian I may perchance be ac- cused of what many intelligent judges would call a crim- inal unwillingness to understand a really noble nature. But, so far as my experience goes, those men who main- tain that the faults of the Indian are chargeable solely to the whites, and that he can be managed in au}^ other way than by repression, either view the situation from an in- experienced and safe distance, or from a financial (^*. e. Indian contract) stand - point, or from one of " practical politics." There are men, benevolent and noble men, who, after studying the subject, truly believe that the Indian can be civilized ; but they only serve to prove the rule. Those men who have spent their lives among the Indians, and have nothing to make out of them, hold but one opin- ion. Narrow politics and the mone}^ in it are the curse of our country. If the Indian could be given over to the army to care for he would behave himself, for he knows that he receives justice, both in peace and war, from the blue-coats. But so long as Indian agents can grow rich fast, and there are a lot of fat jobs for the men who vote the successful ticket, so long will the Indian be cheated out of his rations, go on the war-path in revenge, and be doomed to fall under the sabre of the unwilling soldier. If there is or ever has been a more lamentable spectacle 60 THE TRUE INDIAN in the political life of any nation than the cross-purposes of our Indian and War Departments, I have failed to find it. We Americans, thanks to the inexhaustible riches of our soil, are giants in all we do; and we are giants in folly as well as in creation ; witness our Silver Bill, our McKinley Tariff, our Pension Legislation, and our Indian Problem. XIII Previous to our Civil War, the lack of knowledge abroad with regard to the United States ^vas singular. We were ignored in the economy of nations, in the schools and society of the Old World, as of no impor- tance. To most people America was as yet undiscovered. Only the most advanced thinkers had divined that we were working out the problem of the future. To see their countries become Americanized was the nightmare of rulers, as it is now the dream of the more intelligent of the peoples. The blot of slavery was still upon us, and we were numerically among the smaller nations. When, sent to a monastic school in Belgium at the age of ten, I was led into the petite cour and introduced by the Pore Superieur to the crowd of eagerly expectant boys, " Tenez, mes enfants, voihi votre nouveau camarade, le jeune Americain !" I well remember a fair-faced lad (he was a son of a banished Polish noble) who went up to the father and plucked him by his skirt, with " Mais, mon pere, il est blanc comme nous.'' His keen disappoint- ment at my not being black, for he had never seen a negro, he ahvays rather laid up against me. And when later I attended the Friedrich-Werderschen Gymnasium in Berlin, the only two ideas I could ever find that boys of my age had assimilated out of tlie shreds and patches thev had been taug-ht about America, were Niao:ara and slavery. How much did a Massachusetts lad who had left home in his first decade know about slaver}^, or 62 A PSYCHICAL PHENOMENON how many, in those stage - coach days, had been to the great falls ? " Ach, du bist kein Amerikaner," my play- mates would exclaim, " wenn du NiagfuTra nicht gesehen hast !" imagining, no doubt, that this world - famed cata- ract was at every man's back door. And my never even having seen a slave stamped me still more of an impostor. To wander for a moment from anything akin to horse- flesh or America, to what, if imaginative, I would trans- form into aps3^chical phenomenon : The little Polish noble before referred to and I became fast friends, and for years wandered arm in arm around the playground. ISTearly forty years ago we separated, and neither, for four dec- ades, heard aught of the other, nor made any effort to hunt him up. In April last I landed at Constantinople — as usual with tourists out of money — and repaired at once to my bankers. My letter of credit and draft went into Mr. A's private office for approval. Almost at once out he came with, " Bless me, you are the very man I" " ]Sro doubt," I rephed ; " I always have been, but wh}^ just now ?" " Were you ever at school in Belgium ?" he asked. "Yes." "Did you have a school-mate named Ladislas Cz ski?" "Why, yes." "Well, he is now Mo er Pacha, Inspector-General of Cavalry, and Aide- de-camp to H. I. M. the Sultan, and only last week he told me he once had a school-mate named Theodore Dodge, and asked me to write to my correspondents in America and see if I could find trace of him !" Here, then, had my ancient scliool-friend, for the first time in forty years, sought to hunt me up, and I, for the first time in my life, had turned up at Constantinople. And yet it was mere coincidence. Is not this such stuff as dreams are made of — or superstition, or psychology ? How easy to warp this occurrence into something, lot us say, spooky ! The ignorance on the part of Europeans concerning OUR CAVALRY 63 US WHS, however, in nowise more curious, and was mucli less culpable, than our own ignorance of to - day respect- ing our South American neighbors, despite even the Pan- Americans. How many of us can tell the form of gov- ernment of half the South American States, or their geographical features or limits, or their chief products, or their population, or climate, or even their capital cities, unless he is still in the grammar-school. Our Civil War wrought a change. "VVe hewed our- selves into notice by the doughtiest blows delivered in war since the era of Napoleon. Yet were the most con- servative among the military autocrats of Europe unwill- ing, till towards the very end, to look upon us in any other light than as armed mobs, and even in the war of ^6hoi'se carries very little less than two hundred and fifty pounds — eighty-eight pounds for equip- ment and baggage, and, say, one hundred and sixty for the rider. In camp he is well fed ; on the march he can- not always be, and he is watered at irregular intervals. All tliese tiiin<:s tell amiinst him. A NOTEWORTHY RIDE 79 In 1873 Colonel Mackenzie rode liis command into Mexico after Lepan and Kickapoo Indians, beat them in a sharp fight, and returned across the border, making one hundred and forty-five miles in twenty-eight hours. In 1874 he again rode his command into Mexico after horse- thieves, making there and back, eighty-five miles, in fif- teen hours. In 1880, Captain A. E. Wood, Fourth Cavalry, one of the most thorough horsemen I have ever known, rode, with eight men, in pursuit of a thieving deserter, one hundred and forty miles in thirty-one hours. Let him tell his own story. It shows just how the trick is done : "In the month of September, 1880, I was stationed at Fort Reno, Indian Territory ; the paymaster had visited us, and in those days, after such a visit, some desertion was expected. " About noon one day the latter part of September, the post commander sent for and astonished me by stating that the first sergeant of his company — Twenty-third In- fantry — had deserted, taking with him a considerable amount of the compan}^ fund, and he wanted me to catch him if possible. He had discovered that the sergeant had bought one strong Indian pony and had stolen another. " The direction taken by the sergeant was not known, but under the circumstances I thought that he intended to reach the railroad as soon as possible. The nearest railroad was in Southern Kansas — ^the nearest point Ar- kansas City, one hundred and forty miles as the trail then went. I took a detail of two non-commissioned officers and six men from G troop. Fourth Cavalry. " The detail was taken from the roster, except the first sergeant of G troop, who asked to go with me ; the horses belonged to the riders ; none were selected as especially qualified for the trip. I rode the same horse that I had been ridino: for months. so CARE OF BACKS " I took two pack-mules with the men's rations ; they were loaded with about eighty pounds each. We left the post at 1.35 P.M. The day was quite hot, and knowing what was before me, I did not push the animals very hard for the first twenty-five miles, which distance we had made by 6 P.M. This distance brought us to Kingfisher Creek, where we halted for one hour — unsaddled, got some- thino- to eat, let the horses roll and graze, then groomed their backs and legs, saddled up and started at 7 p.m. " We started and walked for thirty minutes, then took a trot for fifty minutes, when we dismounted and rested for ten minutes ; adjusted the saddles, mounted, and took the trot for fifty minutes, dismounted and walked for ten minutes. We thus trotted at about a six-mile gait for a little more than fifty minutes, and dismounted and walked for ten minutes, until 12 p.m., when we halted and rested for twenty minutes. We then mounted and kept up the trotting for fifty minutes, dismounting and walking for ten minutes, until about 4.50 a.m., a little after day- break, Avhen we were so overcome with sleep that I al- lowed the men to dismount, unsaddle, and sleep for about an hour. My mind was so busy that I could not sleep much, so I awoke the men. We groomed the backs and rubbed the legs of the horses for a short time and re- sumed the journey as before. When we had gone about one hundred and twenty miles we again halted, unsaddled, let the horses rest, and made some coffee. This rest took three-quarters of an hour, after which we started and trav- elled as before until we reached Arkansas City at 8.30 p.m. — thirty-one hours. Men and horses were extremely tired ; one horse was (juite lame in front. We rested tlie remain- der of tlie night, the next da}' and night, and then marched to Caldwell, Kansas, thirty-five miles, the succeeding day. We remained at Caldwell two nights and a da}, and FAST TIME 81 marched back to Fort Reno, a distance of one hundred and fifteen miles by ordinary marches. All but one horse seemed to be rested when we reached Caldwell. This horse was unserviceable when we reached Fort Reno, the others were apparently as good as ever. The above is a record of the hardest ride I ever undertook. The fa- tigue was very great ; but a good night's rest completely restored all of us. " At that time our mounts were purchased in Missouri and Kansas. The horse I rode was twelve years old ; the others were a little younger. I think that the horse that was rendered unserviceable was made so by bad riding. His rider was not a very good horseman, and rode too heavily forward. I tried to correct this, but it is impossi- ble to teach all the niceties of horsemanship on such a trip." In 1870 four men of Company H, First Cavalry, bore despatches from Fort Harney to Fort Warner, one hun- dred and forty miles, over a bad road — twenty of it sand — with little and bad water, in twenty-two hours, eighteen and a half of which was actual marching time. The horses were in such good condition at the end of the ride that after one day's rest the men started back, and made the home trip at the rate of sixty miles a day. In 1879 Cap- tain Dodge, with his troop, rode eighty miles in sixteen hours, and Lieutenant "Wood, with his troop, rode seventy miles in twelve hours. In December, 1890, Captain Fechet, with troops F and G, Eighth Cavalry, left Fort Yates at midnight, reached Sitting Bull's camp, forty-five miles dis- tant, at 7.20 A.M., drove off his band, and rescued the sur- vivors of the Indian police who had arrested and in the melee killed Sitting Bull. The two troops then scouted the country for ten miles around and marched back, reach- ing Oak Creek at 2 p.m. — a total distance of eighty-five 6 82 RAIDERS AND PURSUERS miles in fourteen hours. " The roads were frozen hard and half covered with ice and snow. At the end of the ride there was not a saddle-boil nor a broken-down horse or man." In 1880 Colonel Henry, with four troops, rode one hundred and eight miles in thirty-three hours, being in the saddle twenty-two hours. One horse dropped dead at the end of the march, but there was not a sore-backed horse in the regiment, and they started out again after a rest of twenty-four hours. The same command made a night march of fifty miles in ten hours. General Merritt in 1879, with four troops, and ham- pered by a battalion of infantry in wagons, rode one hundred and seventy miles to the relief of Payne in sixty- six and one -half hours, and reached the scene in prime order and ready to go into a fight. Yery long distances have been covered by cavalry regiments at the rate of sixty miles a day. Colonel Henry, an expert on this sub- ject, speaking of hardening the men and horses of a com- mand by a month's drills of from fifteen to twenty miles at rapid gaits, aptly says : " A cavalry command thus hardened, and with increased feeds, ought to be able to make fifty to sixty miles a day as long as required ; and to such a command one hundred miles in twenty -four hours ought to be easy. The horse, like the athlete, needs training, and when this is done his endurance is limited only by that of his rider." In 1877 General Miles organized in Arizona a plan for accustoming men and horses to severe work by rides across the plains by a party of " raiders," followed by another of "pursuers." The parties were usually about twenty strong. The ])ursuers were not allowed to start until eighteen hours after the raiders, but the raiders were bound to rest six hours after marching eighteen hours, and again twelve after marching twelve more. The pur- WHO WINS THE PRIZE? 83 suers could " go as you please," but were ordered not to injure stock by hard riding. Of these rides, which are not under the spur of compulsion, a few may be given as of interest. On September 17th, Lieutenant Scott, Sixth Cavalry, and twenty-five men, started from Fort Stanton towards Fort Bayard, and was overtaken in forty-two and one half hours marching time, at a distance of one hun- dred and thirty miles. The pursuers. Lieutenant Persh- ing and twenty -seven men, made the one hundred and thirty miles in fifty-four and one-half hours from start to capture. On September 25th, Lieutenant McGrath, Fourth Cavalry, and twenty-two men, started from Fort Bowie to Fort Apache ; he made one hundred and seven- ty-three miles in forty -two hours' marching time. On September 26-27, Lieutenant Scott and twenty-five men, in pursuit of Lieutenant Pershing, made one hundred and ten miles in twenty-six hours ten minutes. On Novem- ber 1-3, Lieutenant Pershing and twenty-two men, pur- suing Captain Wallace, made one hundred and thirty miles in fifty-seven hours. Captain Chafi'ee, in pursuit of Captain Kerr, made on September 21-25 seventy miles in twenty hours with seventeen men. These are but a few instances which any of our cavalry officers can duplicate from their own knowledge. I could quote very many more. Now, if we take the conditions under which these rides have been made, viz., a common- bred native troop horse, not always kept hard and ready for work ; the exceptional weight carried, for all but the courier work was done with full equipment ; the fact that most of the courses were over country without roads, or only trails, which are the merest apology for roads, and often hilly and badly cut up ; that the pace must be made for the slowest horses, and be such that weak factors in the troop shall be respected ; that the incentive was thir- 84 THE SOLDIER'S PLUCK teen dollars a mouth and simple duty, and not a splendid money prize of five thousand dollars and the commenda- tion of emperors ; and, above all, that the commands have uniformly been brought in without injury to man or beast, we shall find matter for justifiable self-gratulation. XVII I HAVE from youth been reasonably familiar with the performances of European cavalry, and have studied the Arabian horse in the French army in Algiers, and in his native haunts on the Libyan and Syrian deserts. I have sought assiduously for records of great performances ; but. exceptional work is only called out by exceptional needs, and abroad these are apt to be wanting. Granted that the German cavalry, for example, is marvellously drilled ; that it has the stomach to fight has been a notorious fact ever since the days of Ziethen and Seidlitz. Granted that it can perform precise evolutions or charge without confusion on the battle-field in masses greater than our entire cavalry force ; yet this by no means reaches the heart of distance riding. Such a thing as our raider and pursuer drills would never be dreamed of in Germany. All our work on the plains tends to distance riding, and in no other regular army in the world does this obtain. The Austro-Hungarian cavalry is better fitted than the German for distance riding, and has, as a pattern, the steppes man and horse, who are unexcelled in this very thing. In Algeria, while the horse of the Nineteenth Corps d'Armee is all mounted on Arabians, there is apt to be no call for excessive marches, and there is no prepara- tion for them. The Spahis, or light cavalrymen of native birth, are in constant movement all over the country, but they have the true Oriental trick of not overworking themselves ; and so far as wonderful individual distance 86 UNRELIABLE EVIDENCE rides are concerned, I have been unable to pin down a single such ride to reliable evidence. An Arab sheik out in the desert, who owns a high-bred mare, will tell you of marvellous performances, but they are as nebulous as his own Thousand and One NigJtts. I once sought to pur- chase some speed — a drive of eighty miles over the excel- lent turnpike from Soussa to Tunis — in order to catch a steamer ; but though the owner of some really fine Ara- bians had been telling about the three hundred kilometres (one hundred and eighty-six miles) a day they could do, no amount of money could induce him to agree to take me over the course of eighty miles with four horses and a light vehicle in less than twenty hours. It used to be asserted that the Turcoman cavalry could ride in large bodies one hundred miles a day for a Aveek, or even more ; but, though all the steppes horses of the world, like our broncos, are incomparable stayers on their own terrain, this distance must be cut down by a large percentage. My ancient school - friend, now a pacha, major-general, and chief of the forty thousand odd Kurd- ish cavalry of the Turkish Empire, though absolutely familiar with the subject, was unwilling to vouch for such a statement. The Kurdish is practically the same as the Turcoman horse. In talking it over, this gentle- man cited one of his own distance rides, fifteen hundred kilometres in forty -five days, as a great performance, which he thought established the reputation of the horse of Asia Minor beyond cavil. But this is only thirty-three miles a day. It was unnecessary to argue the matter, as it would not have elicited more accurate statistics. After all said, the palm for distance riding must be awarded to our own cavalry officers. Taking all the con- ditions into account, there are probably no civilized horse- men who can ride so far with a body of men and bring THE AMERICAN MAMMAL 87 them to the end of their journey in as clean a condition as the best of our officers on the plains. The talent to do this is by no means universal ; but it is wide-spread. And though we may marvel at the recent three hundred and fift}" miles ridden in from seventy-two to eighty hours by the most expert foreign horsemen on their picked horses, the record of dead and foundered steeds leads us to be- lieve that we could have done as well and saved our horses. This brings us again to the question of the endurance of the American mammal. Except the ass, there is per- haps no creature of the equine race as stubbornly endur- mg as the bronco. This is largel}^ due to the American climate. The record of runnino; and trotting time in America tends to prove the same thing ; and our athletic records, considering how recently born our athletic fad is, are of high grade. The fact that the common States' horse can be taken and, after short training, made to do such marvels of distance work, not only proves the intelli- gence of our officers but sustains the claim of superior vitality in the horse. XYIII And now, my hard -riding cross-country brothers, ye who win glory in the polo-field ; ye who deem that twen- ty-five or thirty miles in fine weather, over the best of roads, without other weight than your own avoirckipois and a light saddle, is a good day's work for man and beast ; ye who (I know you don't mean it, or do it with- out reflection) are wont to scoff at the West Point rider, or listen to the persuasive ranchman as he runs down the work of the Army because it does not always chime in with his own peculiar interests ; ye who flatter yourselves that you and your ilk are peerless horsemen, and who run no risk beyond an occasional spill — will you not agree with me that the above Army rides are hard jewels to match? If you and I, on our thousand-dollar imported mounts — not to quote fancy prices — should cover even seventy miles in thirty-one hours (we should prefer to do it in two instalments, you know, chappie !), should we not have a good week's glory at the club, and be the cynosure of neighboring eyes ? But do you think we should care, with Captain Wood, to double up that distance, sit thirty- one consecutive hours in the saddle, and do one hundred and forty miles for tlie sake of — thirteen dollars a month and duty? Not but what, in my youth and prime, I might have done ; not but what to-day you might, under parallel circumstances, do that very thing ! Good Amer- ican grit is the same at all times and in all places. I am not discounting your ability to perform ; and that your DON'T RUN DOWN THE ARMY! 89 generous horseman's heart — for no man who loves a horse e'er lacks the touch of nature — must warm towards the blue -coats who can accomplish such feats it needs no words to tell. It takes gimp, brother, it takes intelli- gence, it takes that sympathetic knowledge of the horse which we all admire. Let me ask you to study these little items — you can find no end of others if you will take the trouble to hunt them up — and when you feel inclined to criticise the Army because it does not accomplish the im- possible, just stop and think. Men who can ride such dis- tances as these are apt to do all that flesh and blood can stand. Ta-ta ! XIX In constant association with the cavahyman comes that most faithful servant — the only good Indian except a dead one — the Indian scout. There are numbers of these men enlisted in the Army, and many more when oc- casion demands have been temporarily in service. These men are not to be confounded with the Indians who have recently been recruited, with questionable results, in the rank and file. The scouts are men of exceptional reli- ability and intelligence, and as a rule have proved to be valuable in a high degree. Some have rendered unusual service. The Indian scout receives the pay and allowance of the cavalry soldier. He may have come of any tribe. He finds his own ponies, but has issued to him a Govern- ment saddle and equipments, and barring spurs, for which he substitutes the invariable quirt, delights in Uncle Sam's uniform, as, more's the pity, every soldier does not. Why is the profession which, honorably filled, is the noblest of all professions, if courage, endurance, and all the most manly qualities in their highest expression can ennoble a profession, looked on askance by ail-Americans 'i It is a fact of which we should be heartily ashamed, that the United States uniform, which has covered the breasts of so many heroes, from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant, is to-day a badge of ostracism. It is this, more than any other one fact, which lies at the root of the nu- merous desertions from the Army. Since the aborigines have been kept on the reserva- DRUBBING HIS RIBS 93 tions, the Indian scout has ridden an imitation of the cav- ahy seat, and has broken himself of kicking his pon3^'s ribs at every stride. The Indian is vain and imitative, and these two quahties make him a servant of the repub- lic equally tractable and reliable. We are indebted to him for much of the best service, and in his ranks have been numbered many men whose names are household words. This habit of drubbing the horse's ribs is one by no means confined to the Indian, though he indulges in it to excess. You see it in Central Park, in Rotten Row, in all the cavalry of Europe, among the Arabs, on the steppes of Russia. Its special use among all these appears to be to keep the horse at a rapid walk ; when a horse is on a faster gait, it is chiefly the Indian who keeps up the pound- ing. It is of no particular value ; for, like the use of the whip, familiarity soon breeds contempt, and the horse per- forms no better for the punishment and less willingly for the worry. It is an ungainly trick, too, much on a par with swinging the legs at a trot. In a soldier particularly one wishes to see that sort of precision which should be a sequence of a perfect setting-up ; and the trick of using the heels at everj^ moment sadly mars the military seat. There are other ways of keeping a horse at his best which are not so objectionable as this. XX We have travelled so near the border that we cannot well atford not to pay a visit to our neighbors. All ex- cept jealously conservative Canadians will acknowledge that there are many things which the Dominion might learn to advantage from the States ; and there are incon- testably others in which the Dominion might give us points. Among these, what we have been discussing sug- gests its management of the Indian, which has always been in marked contrast to our own. Among other in- struments of our neighbor's Indian Department is a bri- gade of cavalry known as the Canadian Mounted Police. This is an uncommonly line body of men, numbering on its roster many of the better classes. They have the usual military organization, but are distributed in small troops all over Canada, Their duties are chiefly to suppress the whiskey trade — for fire-water has always been and is still the greatest of the red man's foes — keep the Indians in sub- jection, and aid the sheriffs of the various counties. These men ride a bred -up bronco. Their saddle is what is known as the jVIontana tree, and for this style of saddle they ride with rather too short a stirrup to suit our notions — a seat akin to the English military seat. On a trot they pound, as with such short stirrups they cannot well avoid doing. The seat of the United States soldier is apparently contrasted to theirs, and each method not only has its ad- vocates, but produces in nuiny individuals the best of horsemanship. The seat of this rider gives him a pur- W^^'^ 11 iiiiiiiii iiiiiiii niiiin\u»\i\\\ CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE HANDS AND HEELS 97 chase with the thigh, the inside of the knee, and when he closes his legs, as he must in the ranks, with the upper part of the calf. It is in accordance with the old saw of " 'ands and 'eels low, 'ead and 'eart 'igh," under which so many splendid horsemen have grown up— except that his bridle hand is raised by the blanket roll or carbine. He seems to be sitting, as he faces us, in just the style he ought not to sit. No one but a Mexican or the ghost of a knight in armor rides in this form. It is not unnatural for a man to thrust out his feet as a change of position, but it is the very worst seat in which a man can indulge if he retains it habitually. The world seems to be sliding into other notions than it used to have. The 'ands and 'eels low applies to the hands only. The English cross-country rider of to-day has his foot no more than level when at rest, and keeps his toe w^ell down when in motion. This has partly come about from the trick of holding the stirrup in place when leaping, and partly from the fact that the Briton, even after hounds, does not ride with leathers as short as j^ears ago. We used to hear, particularly during our war, many an Old Country man ridicule the American cavalry seat, because our men hang their toes Avhen in the saddle, rather than depress their heels, as her Majesty's troopers and school -riders are supposed to do. In some respects this is not strange, for many an Englishman will, as a matter of habit or of keeping his hand in, criticise every- thing he runs across, whether he knows anything about it or not. It is merely a trick, a sort of weak offshoot of the excellent character which gives him his energy and cour- age and stick-to-ativeness. And the veriest little London cockney, who has never thrown his leg across anything but a broken-down ninepence-an-hour 'Ampstead 'Eath 'ack, will undertake to criticise the riding of the cowboy 98 REPUBLICS or the Southerner. But the variation between the seats of the two soldiers in question is not great ; they are, in actual fact, nearly alike. Make a composite photograph of live hundred American and another of five hundred British troopers, and it will be found that the three lines which establish the seat — ^the back-bone, the thig-h-bone, and the shank-bone — will lie with small variation upon each other, wiiile the position on the back of the horse will in neither case be far from the correct one. The low-carried toe merely gives the appearance of a straighter leg ; there is practically the same seat. One advantage of "heels down" is that it lends a bit more griping power to the upper muscle of the calf ; but to gain the ankle-play which is essential to comfortable riding with long stirrups, the foot should be level, so as to yield as much up as down motion. Neither extreme is beneficial. Though I have always been an advocate of the old-fashioned seat, ac- quaintance with many wonderful riders with toes pendent has taught me that this style has its advantages. It ap- proaches nearer the bareback seat than any other, and by far the greater number of civilized equestrians ride with toe rather than heel depressed. The Canadian Mounted Police is one of the most effi- cient organizations which exist, and it accomplishes its purpose because it is not interfered with. Its work tells and is appreciated, as the much harder and more danger- ous duties of our cavalry are not. There are some benefits which accrue to the individual from a centralized govern- ment which our own does not so well afford. That a true republic, well governed, is the best of governments can scarcely be denied ; but in an illy or laxly governed republic abuses and hardships spring up as by magic and thrive apace. By republic I do not mean tlie soi-disant republics of the world. I know of but three real repub- POLITICS TABOO 99 lies — Switzerland, Great Britain, and America. But this is politics ; and. according to the Loyal Legion rnle, who- ever refers to politics at a meeting of the Commandery is for the lirst offence fined thirty dollars, and for the sec- ond is dismissed the Order. Let us consider this a meet- ing- and enforce the rule. XXI The cowboy is in the saddle more than any man on the plains. He rides what is well known as the cowboy's saddle, or Brazos tree. It is adapted from the old Span- ish saddle— is, in fact, almost similar — and differs sensibly from the Mexican. The line of its seat from cantle to horn, viewed sidewise, is a semicircle ; there is no flat place to sit on. This shape gives the cowboy, seen from the side, all but as perpendicular a seat in the saddle as the old knight in armor. There are, of course, other sad- dles in use. The Texas saddle has a much flatter seat than the Brazos tree; the Cheyenne saddle a still flatter one, with a high cantle and a different cut of pommel- arch and bearing, and some individuals may ride any pe- culiar saddle ; but all must have the horn and high cantle. In no other tree would the cowboy be at home or fit for service. Not only this, but in a flat English saddle the cowboy cuts a sorry figure. One of the best-known men in America, the owner of a big Western ranch — where, of course, he rides d la cowboy, and when East noted as a bold and skilful rider in the Meadow Brook Hunt, where of course, too, he rides a flat saddle — told me that once his ranch superintendent, a well-known bronco -buster, when East, was compelled to ride an English saddle, and that the man was fairly slipping off sidewise every minute or two. He simply could not ride the thing at all, nor for a long time get the hang of it. The cowboy is careful of his ponies, not only from a NAVAJO BLANKETS 101 horseman's motives, but because he is held to account for them. Unlike the Indian, he rarely has a sore-backed nag. He often uses a gunny- bag saddle-cloth next the pony's skin, the hempen fibre of which keeps the back cool, and over this, for padding, his woollen blanket. In the South- west he is apt to sport a variegated saddle - cloth with fringed edge, such as the Mexicans parade ; and if he can manage to get hold of a Navajo blanket he is fixed. These wonderful bits of handwork, of bright, agreeable colors, are worth from fifty dollars upwards, never seem to wear out, are cool and pleasant to the pony's skin, do not gall, and are by long odds the best thing under a sad- dle which exists. The Indian will give from two ponies upwards for one of them, when he can buy a wiie for one pony, and not a very good pony (or wife) at that. The cowboy's saddle is held in place by one very wide or two narrower hair cinchas, though the single cincha is more a Californian than a plains habit ; if one, it is, among plains riders, always put a full hand-breadth back of what in the East we call the girth-place. The rear girth gets a purchase on the back slope of the ribs. The cowboy's bit is any kind of a curb with a long gag. He rides under all conditions with a loose rein, the bit ends of which are often made of chain, to prevent the pony from chewing it off, and this clanks a rhythmic jingle to his easy lope. His pony is as surefooted as a mountain goat, and will safely scramble with his big load up a cliff, or slide down a bank which w^ould make our tenderfoot hair stand on end. The loose rein and the sharp gag enable the cowboy with the least jeik to pull his pony back on his haunches, for the pony is unused to a steady hold. The cowboy is assuredly no three-legged rider. The bit hangs in a fancy trade-bridle, which the cowboy ornaments in various fashions to suit his own 102 FEEL OF THE MOUTH ideas of style. The effect of its use on the pony is pre- cisely the reverse of that which is made by a bit on a horse suppled by school methods or even bitted, and which has been ridden on a light touch. The latter brings down his head to the hand, with an arched neck, easy mouth, and a give-and-take feel of the hand. The pony, at the least intimation of the bit, long before the rein is taut, jerks up his head, and must have a tough mouth, or an exceptional fright, to make him take hold of you. This habit of using a severe bit and of never allowing the horse to take hold of it is partaken by the majority of the riders of the world. All Orientals, without excep- tion, bit a horse in .this fashion. I have at intervals seen a man in the Orient with an easy bit, ])laying it with a light touch — by touch I mean an actual feel of the horse's mouth — and with a neat and easy hand ; but it is very rare. A loose rein gives no useful touch. You can start your horse with the spur or whip, or -svitli a word ; you can stop him with the merest touch of the rein ; you can guide him by the rein on his neck. But I deem it impossible to communicate with a horse as intimately with this loose rein as you can with the touch of a bit and bridoon, well adjusted, and which you always hold so as to have the least possible delicate feel of the horse's mouth. Such a touch not only yields a sense of compan- ionship between man and beast, but the horse unquestion- ably likes the ])leasant conversation which thus goes on. A man may talk ^vith his horse in words, and of these an intelligent horse is very fond ; l)ut tliey will at least be rare. If he is in tlie hal)it of talking to him through the rein and l)it, liis hands will be always talking — and it is this that ])leases and controls the true saddle - beast. 1 will discuss this point again wlien I como to speak of 'im 'I if ]e getting his left elbow in the hollow of the neck just forward of the withers, nothing which the ]K)iiy can RISING TO A TROT 107 do can keep him out of the saddle. In fact, a plunge which drags hiin from his feet will all the more certainly swine: him to his seat. Then, after a series of bucks more or less severe, according as to how much the pony has been '' busted," during which exercise the cowboy's s])urs go time and again into the pony's flanks, and the pony acts like the veriest wild beast, the mastery is established where it ]:)ro])erly belongs, the l)ony steadies down after a fashion, and harmony, such as it is, reigns till the next time of mounting. The cowboy universally rides a lope, as do all people who use wild horses. The bronco has no other gait, in fact, unless a sort of fox-trot. The cowboy's seat is un- suited to an open trot. He won't ride it if he can help it, and it miiy as well be confessed, he cannot — and no one can — sit close without pounding to the long rangy trot of a big thorough-bred, though it is the perfection of gaits if you rise to it. There is a good deal of nonsense talked about rising to a trot — almost as much as there is about drinking iced - water. The fact is that all peoples, wild and semi-civilized, who are used to horses, rise to a trot. They don't do it often because they prefer and train their horses to other and better gaits ; but if their mount falls into a trot, or they happen to ride a trotting horse, they naturally rise, as a matter of course. It is onl}'' those who stick exclusively to the old ramrod pat- tern who do not do so. I seem to have roped iced-water into the question, but I will use it only to quote a clever friend of mine, a doc- tor of no mean repute. Said he to me one day : " AA^hy do you all declaim against iced-water ? Of course it can be abused by drinking in a heated condition — so can any other food or drink be abused. But all animals drink iced-water a good part of the year. AVhen you water a 108 COWBOY ACROSS COUNTRY farm-Horse or your cows at the brook in January, what else are they drinking ? And yet, does it hurt them ? N"o," suiting the action to the word, '• iced- water is a health- ful drink, properly used." We hear from many that the cowboy can do ever}^- thing. Rumors run that some of Buffalo Bill's cowboys rode English horses in their own saddles and beat every- thing to hounds somewhere in the Midland counties — we won't be specific and say the Belvoir. Those who know the country this implies and its riders accept this statement cum grano. But assume its truth. One often sees a dare - devil of an English lad just out of college who imagines, because he has once or twice led the field on one af the squire's crack hunters, that he is the best rider in it. But, in truth, he is risking his horse's, not to count his own less valuable neck, at ever3^ obstacle he clears, and pumping the last ounce out of his generous beast, while wiser and older riders close behind him are saving their horses and bringing them in fresh and able. It is not riding a fabulous distance, or at the greatest speed, or with the most conspicuous daring, which is the test, but getting in at the death with the least exertion to man and beast. The highest proof of artistic horseman- ship is to accomplish your task with the least expenditure of pliysical force. To keep the horse in good condition is, among civilized people, a greater test than the speed or daring- of the rider. Witness the Berlin-Vienna ride. So in the great tests of distance made by plains ponies and civilized horses one element is apt to be forgotten. The latter must be ])i'ought in without injury; the ]wny may be killed by the feat. No (question whatever that il' tlie l)ony and the thorough - bred, under even conditions, be ridden until both fall in tiieir tracks, the pony will be beaten in speed and distance. It seems to me clear that ENGLISHMEN ON THE PLAINS 109 thorough-bred s have always beaten ponies ; but that the pony will recover from what may kill the thorough-bred is equally clear. In the Berlin - Vienna ride no doubt fewer of the ponies died ; but those thorough- breds which died a day or two after could probably have gone much farther and left the ponies still farther behind, before they dropped. The grit of the thorough-bred is a wonder- ful element. So long as you keep him moving he will resist death in a manner utterly inexplicable ; when, if you stop him, he may die in a few hours. But the cowboy is unequalled in his own province, and this is enough of fame. His seat is astonishing. It is a common feat for him to put a playing-card on the saddle, or a dollar piece under each foot in the stirrup, or under his knees, and ride a vigorous bucker. Still he cannot ride a flat saddle until he learns the trick of it. And while no cowboy, without serving his apprenticeship in the hunting-field, would hold his own with practised rid- ers there, it is certain that he would much sooner learn to ride across country well than even the best of cross- country men could vie with him in controlling a vicious bronco, or indeed, in riding over the rough country he is wont to cover. It is the universal experience of the plains that the best English rider fights shy of ground which the cowboy will gallop over, until he catches on to it and confides in the sure feet of his little mount. Some men never learn to ride ; but it stands to reason, caeteris paribus, that the man who makes riding his business will be a stouter horseman than one to whom it is a mere diversion. XXII As a rough-rider the cowboy \^ facile pri7icep8 ; as a horse-breaker he devotes too little time to his task, nor does he go to work in the way best calculated to produce a quiet nag. Bronco-busting is a distinct art. The bron- co-buster may be a "professional," who has originally taken up the work to replenish his exchequer, depleted by whiskey or polcer, and sticks to it for lack of an easier job, and because he is at low- water-mark; or he may be a cow-puncher in slack times. As a rule he cannot stick it out very long, for the business is sure to end by busting the buster. It is unquestionably the most violent form of athletics, and the bronco -buster, though he must be strong and active, is not, as a rule, in the exceptional con- dition necessar}^ for great feats of strength and endur- ance. Indeed, training would scarcely help him much. Whatever his strength and health, the bronco - buster is sure to get hurt sooner or later. He works it off and on at ten dollars a bronco. All cowboys do more or less breaking, and some ranches always break their o^vn ponies, and generally have better ones for so doing, because they give each pony more time. The typical bronco-buster should weigh a hundred and seventy or a hundred and eighty pounds. Weight does the business when a light man can accomplish noth- mii:, thouo:h one of the most successfid bronco -riders of whom I ever heard was a long -geared, lank Texas lad, wlio would stick to his horse till his head would snap "BUSTING" 111 like a whip with the bucking, and he himself lose con- sciousness. Indeed, it is not uncommon for violent pitch- ing to produce hemorrhage of the lungs, while hernia, cracked bones, and serious sprains are frequent disasters. There is no creature in the service of man which can put its master to such violent efforts in its subjugation as the bronco. Of course a better plan would be the more gradual one of civilized trainers, but for this there is no leisure. The whole secret of "busting" (the word is advisedly used, as picturesquely expressive of the process, in contra- diction to breaking) lies in completely exhausting the bronco at the first lesson ; he will never buck " for keeps" more than once. Buffalo Bill's ponies have been allowed to throw their riders, or the rider has judiciously slipped off at the right intervals, thus impressing the idea on the bronco's intelligence that he can surely throw his man if he sticks long enough to his bucking. But once ridden to the verge of falhng in his tracks, the pony will not do his level worst again, but content himself with grunting and yelling, '" knocking his teeth out " and playing the devil generally. The buster must be careful to keep well away from sheds and timber, and have room enough to cut a wide swath. He must be able to stick to his saddle like a leech, with or without stirrups. If, indeed, he needs his stirrups for a hold, he is not looked on as much of a rider ; and it is a matter of pride with the " sure enough " buster not to rely on anj^thing but what old horsemen call glue. To show his contempt for the bronco's power, he will ply the quirt at every jump. It is a fair fight and no favor between man and beast. But the buster has been there before, and knows exactly what he is about ; the bronco is new to the business, and though he in- variably makes a good fight, he is sure to have to give 112 PRELIMINARIES in. Some ponies take more busting than others, and some always buck more or less, however well broken. In fact, when the punchers turn out of a cold morning, the ponies will pitch through the entire outfit, and the crowd stands around to see each man mount, watch the fun, and chaff the rider. If a pony chances to win a heat and his rider comes a cropper, it is what genial John Leech calls a " little 'olliday " to the rest of the boys. Two rides will usually bust a bronco so that the aver- age cow-puncher can use him, but he would scarcely keep company long with most Central Park riders. Two men generally work together. They enter the corral, where there is apt to be a, good bunch of ponies; and these, as if guessing what is to come, at once jump away, and go careering madly around the enclosure. One man handles the rope, which he trails along the ground until he selects his pony, and then, with a sudden and dexterous snap, drags it over his head. A good roper can cast twenty-five feet. Then both men seize hold, dig their heels into the ground to stop the pony — knack will enable even one man to jerk him up, if need be — and finally get a turn round the snubbing - post in the centre of the corral. There they have the pony fast, and they gradually work him up to it. The pony does not submit to this vigorous coaxing in any amiable mood. He bucks and plunges, kicks and squeals, and charges straight at his tormentors, who have to play a regular game of hide-and-seek behind the snubbing-post to save themselves from broken bones. But even a bronco with his lungs pumped dry will suc- cumb, and finally the men get the winded pony snubbed up close to the post, where one can hold him while the other gets behind him and catches another rope on one fore -foot. Then, as the pony starts, he yanks tlie foot H<> MM THE FIGHT 115 back, and in nine cases out of ten down goes the pony ; but not ahvays. Some obstinate ones will sink on the other knee, and with the nose on the ground still have four points to stand on. But by-and-by down he must ; the snubbing-rope is made fast, the saddle is fitted on tcmt lien que mal, the cincha worked under, and the whole made fast. Sometimes it is difficult to get a bit in the pony's mouth, and they put on a hackamore, which is a halter-lil^e rope arrangement, a sort of Karey hitch, with an extra twist around his jaw, instead. Then the second rope is loosed and the pony is let up, still held by the snubbing- post rope. This is gradually loosened so as to let the pony have a little fun all to himself, which he is sure to tlo, pitching round in a pretty lively fashion for twenty minutes or half an hour to rid himself of the sad- dle, despite the choking of the rope. This takes the feather edge off him, and he will end up his play covered with foam and quite a bit tired. Some extra vigorous busters ride the pony right off, but the more judicious prefer to let him tire himself out first. When this is done the pony is gradually worked out on the prairie between two ropes, and may perhaps have to be thrown again to cinch him up and get ready for the ride. To keep him down while the rider gets read}', the other man sits on his head, and the rider puts aside his six-shooter and hat and coat and everything superfluous, but keeps his spurs and quirt. Then he seizes the saddle and gets his left foot in the stirrup, the pony is gradually unwound, and the instant he reaches his feet the buster is in the saddle. It is incredible how active these men can be. Now the real fun begins, and the rider and pony go at it in earnest. The other man sometimes g-oes alons: on another horse, with a rope to catch the pony if things 116 THE SURRENDER work wrong; but lie is a wall-flower, and takes no part in the dancing. It is pretty rough sjiort. The pony may be a running bucker, or may stand stock-still and pitch in ])lace at unexpected intervals ; he may buck over a bank ; he may pitch a somerset forward ; he may rear and fall over backward. The rider wants both to stick to his pony and be ready to vault off in short measure if essential. He uses all the legs nature has given him, stirrup or no stir- rup, and lashes his pony at every rise witli all his might. The suaniter in modo is absolutely sunk in the fortiter in re. When the pony rises the trick is to get away from the cantle, and the heavy buster has a fashion when the pony comes down of settling himself in his seat with a hard jolt and a sort of an " Ugh !" — a thing that helps fag out the little fellow, which weighs barely four times as much as the man, was tired before he began, and is now working a dozen times as hard. One way or other the pony will keep his resistance up for a certain length of time, accord- ing to disposition ; but in a couple of hours he will be ridden down. Unless he gets his rider into a snarl, and thus earns a let - up, he will be so played out that he will go along pretty quietly, with but slight attacks of his bucking fever. He has found his master, and he knows it. One more ride will be the final polish of his primary- schooling. The kindergartening has been omitted. The second ride will be a repetition of the first in a slightly modified and less dangerous form. After this the pony is considered "busted;" but his grammar-schooling he gets from the cowboy's use. He never reaches the high or normal school, let alone the college ; but lie has a true Yankee knack of educating himself, and the amount of information and skill he will pick up of his own accord at cow-pimcliiiig is woiKlcrfiil. llr is, of course, taught to FINAL EDUCATION 117 guide by the neck, and he twists and turns in the perform- ance of his duties with extraordinary intelhgence and quickness ; but a good deal of what he does is not so much taught by an educational process as picked up by repeti- tion of the same work, which, after all, is the only way a horse ever learns. XXIII I HATE above referred to '' Buffalo Bill."" There lias probably been no American in Europe since General Grant who has become so universally known. Xot to know "B. B." argues yourself unknown. You see him mentioned in print, or hear him spoken of on every street corner as '•'• Boofalo''^ or ''^Beel^' in every part of the earth where men and women like amusement. He has familiar- ized the Old World' with America; or, I should say, has given the Old World a certain conception of America which is ineffaceable. Whether it is to our advantage to have the universe believe that our common sports are rid- ing pitching ponies, or shooting glass balls from the sad- dle, and that an American Vestibule Limited is, after all. really nothing but a Concord stage-coach, liable to Ije at- tacked by savages, is perhaps questionable. AVe all know Colonel Cody, admire his manly qualities, and feel happy at his financial success — thoroughly well-earned by a cap- ital " sho," than which Phineas T. himself neve* origi- nated a better. But it gives people a queer idea of us some- times, and lends color to the plausibility of the statement I recently saw in Galujnani^s Messenger anent one of our well-known publishers, that "he had been very carefully brought up, and had even had the benefit of an university education." And once I earned the suspicion if not the positive dislike of a very charming woman, a laqtielle je contais fieurette^^'s, we were riding through the Gap of Duiiloe by mildly denying her ])ositive assertion that THE TIRELESS COWBOY 119 Colonel Cody was a regimental commander of our regu- lar army. In fact, she became convinced, to my keen chagrin, that I myself was no army officer, for, said she, '' I know a gentleman Avho has seen his commission." '* Buffalo Bill " represents one phase of our civilization most admirably ; but we have, in the eyes of the semi-in- telligent abroad, fallen as a nation to the estate of Indian fighters and bronco-busters, partly owing to the education given the average circus -public by the otherwise irre- proachable Wild West. For all that, hail to " B. B.," and here's a l)umper to his future ! The cowboy will stay in the saddle an almost unheard- of period, often forty -eight hours at a time, when holding big bunches of cattle. He is up by daylight, and works till dark, and then well on into the night, or all night long bv turns. He is faithful and untiring, and wedded to his master's interests. Much of the vice attributed to the cowboy must be laid to the score of the " bad man " of the plains, a class which used to exist in great numbers, but has been for the most part hunted down and run out by the ranchmen, who were the greatest sufferers. This term " bad man" always strikes me as an odd coin- age for a set of fellows no more noted for abstemiousness in language than mule-drivers. Its very moderation, how- ever, lends it force, though at first blush it sounds like what the children call goody-goody. And out on the plains there is far less overwrought language than in tlie slums of cities. The language is picturesquely forcible, but rarely flavored with Billingsgate. The cowboy is no saint, but he is a manly fellow, and averages quite as well as the farmer or mechanic ; the stranger who has been cast on his hospitality, and has accepted it as frankly as it was tendered, would say much higher. The cow-boy rides with the easy balance bred of con- 120 THE COWBOY'S PICTURESQUENESS stant habit, swaying about in the saddle much like a drunken man, but with a graceful method in his reelmg. He does not, however, ride all over his horse like the Ind- ian on his pad or bareback. When he ropes a steer or a pony, he gets well over on the nigh side, and throws his weight aD:ainst the strain, restins^ the back of the right thigh in the saddle. He can perform all the tricks of the Indian, and much of his fun as well as his work is astride his ponies. On foot he reminds one of Jack ashore, part- 1}'^ from the stiffness of his chaparajos, partly from his own stiffness bred of the saddle habit ; but with his loose garments, his bright kerchief, and his jingling spurs, he is a most attractive fellow, in perfect keeping with his sur- roundings. The best cowboys are usually bred to the business, wliich is by no means an easy one to learn. The South- west yields the best supply. They are apt to claim kin- shi}) with the South rather than the East. The term ''round-up" originated in the southern Alleghanies, "cor- ral " in Mexico. The cattle business is of Mexican origin, and the dress and method of riding are unquestionably of Spanish descent ; but, as in every other business, there are men from every section who succeed, and vastly more who fail. As a whole, with all his virtues and all his faults, he is distinctly an American product, and one, take him for what he is, and what he has done, to be distinctly pr ^M- , al[i»il<;iifc^-^^^^ A MEXICAN VAQUERO A POOR LOT 127 the Mexican tree, and his saddle is loaded down with an abundance of cheap plunder. His seat is the same as the Mexican gentleman's — forked, with toe stuclc far out to the front, and balancing in the saddle. He is supposed to be a famous rider, and is a very good one. He breaks his own ponies, which sufficiently proves his case. He likes to show off, in the true style of the Latin nations and their offshoots, and will often ride a half -busted bronco with his feet stuck out parade fashion, much as a Yankee boy would carry a chip on his shoulder on tlie school- ground ; but in breaking in his pony he gripes with thigh and knee and calf and heels besides, as any rider perforce must. The Mexican cow- ponies are proverbially tough and serviceable ; but the vaquero has to turn in most of his good -sized ponies, and is apt to be seen on a rackabones of undersized or old stock, or on a mare with a foal at foot. His gait is the lope, with an occasional fox- trot, and he uses his quirt as constantly as an American Indian. No savage can be more cruel to his pony than a vaquero, or pay less heed to his welfare. Averaging the vaquero of Northern Mexico, one American cowboy is worth half a dozen of him to work ; and, though he is used to Apache raids, worth more than a gross of him to figlit. In view of the origin of both these cow-punchers, this is not a sin- gular fact. And yet it is strange that the vaquero should bear so ill a reputation. Let us not be unjust. No doubt there are good vaqueros ; but are they, like the good Indian, all with the " great majority ?" I trow not. Give a dog a bad name, and — Well, the vaquero has the bad name ; let us hope that he has not quite earned it. Even Judas Iscariot has had learned defenders, and an excellent tech- nfcal case can be made out for him. Shall the vaquero 128 BKOWX BEAUTIES lack an advocate ? He comes of good stock ; 1 have, in many qualities, rarely seen a finer subject -race than the Mexican Indian. I do not think the Spaniard on Ameri- can soil has thriven, m body or mind ; but the ai)ongines of Mexico have kept their fine })hysique, their good looks, and their amiable character; they have had no chance whatever to gain in intelligence, though they do not lack mother -gumption. 1 hardly think 1 have ever seen a greater percentage of pretty women than in Mexico, among the peasants. One must, to be sure, conjure away dirt and some rather trjdng habits ; but then beauty, abstract- ly speaking, may no doubt reside beneath a grimy exte- rior. I do not refer to that peculiar quality of beauty neatly called appetitlich by the Germans. To evoke one's appetite requires cleanliness rather than the thing we call beauty, and I do not know that I ever saw a Mexican Indian girl whom I would care to embrace ; but they are well-grown, plump, straight, have fine eyes and teeth, and in their unsewn garments of dirty cotton cloth, with a xerapa loosely thrown about head and shoulders, they are certainly fine specimens of womanhood, and graceful be- yond the corseted beauty of civilization. But the skin ! say you. Well, the skin is brown, but it shows the red blood gushing heartily beneath ; and — let us see — even so good a judge as the King of Dahomey preferred liis lustrous, black-skinned, fattened beauties to the most exquisite of pale-face women. And let me con- fess to a weakness for a brown skin. 1 am sure that three out of four of my travelled, susceptible male friends — at least, if they will be honest about it — have grown to like the brown skin of the maidens of the Orient. Ought I to acknowledge tiiat I, too, stand midway between the King of Dahomey and the European connoisseur in beauty ? DOG STORIES 129 "I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, As the tents of Kedar, As the curtains of Solomon," has a more distinct meaning to me to-day than before I learned to know the East, I scarcely dare confess to hav- ing felt a momentary disappointment in the matter of complexions when I once emerged from a burial of sev- eral weeks among Orientals, far from the contact of whites. That the disajipointment was due to the fact that I came out upon a lot of unwashed humanity, and that on a white skin dirt sits less gracefully than on a brown one, in nowise alters the captivating quality of the dark-hued women of the far East. All of which reminds me of a story. I find, as I grow older, that I am more and more frequently reminded of a story, I hold the dangerous tendency in check ; I shorten the curb-chain by a link ; but the tendency will now and then shy at some statement made in perfect innocence, and give a mad plunge off in the direction of a story. And ni}^ gripe on the rein is more lax than of old. It is not my fault, it is your misfortune; I am incapable of kicking a supposititious canine under the table in order to tell a good dog story, but this one must out. Many years ago, down in Eichmond, I was standing with a friend at his doorway while he gave instructions to an old colored servant. There chanced to pass one of the beauties of the city — and there were beauties in those da3^s. We both took off our hats, courtesy in our atti- tude, admiration in our hearts, " Isn't she a beauty ?" said I, '•^IsnH she a beauty ?" echoed he. " Just isn't she. Uncle Jed ?" said my friend. " Miss Ellen's a mighty fine leddy," responded the old servitor, in a deferential but somewhat hesitating tone, "Why, what do you mean. 130 BLACK AND WHITE Uncle Jecir' insisted my friend, rather nettled, and curious withal, at the old darky's manner. " Well, Mars' Tom," stuttered out the old man, " to tell de hones' truf, we niorerers doan tink de white leddies is so hansum as de brack ones." This Avas a revelation to me, not then un- derstood, but now very clear. Our muttons, or lambs, i.e. the Mexican maidens, have been strayed from. Let us return cross-lots to them, and thence along our highwa3\ XXY The prototype of the vaquero, the Mexican gentleman, is a rider of quite another quality. No city man ever ac- quires the second -nature seat on a horse which one can boast who spends all the working-hours of the day, and at times most of his nights, in the saddle. He may be a better horseman ; he may have a better style, actually or according to local notions or traditions ; he may be able to ride on the road, or do some one special thing, such as riding to hounds, or playing polo, or tent pegging, or tilt- ing, exceptionally well ; but, for all that, a chair is more natural to him than a saddle ; and to ask him to ride six- teen consecutive hours, which the cavalryman or the cow- boy does every day, and will double up with a smile, is to ask him to work to the point of complete exhaustion. Horsemanship is a broader term than mere riding. It of necessity comprises the latter to a certain extent. A good horseman must be a good rider, though he may not be a perfect one, from age or disabihty. But the best rider may be a very poor horseman. The best wild rider never spares his horse ; a good horsemen's first thought is for his beast. Still the horseman may by no means be able to equal the rider's feats of daring, endurance, skill, or agility, "Whether horseman or riders, we city folks, compared to the saddle-bred man whose lifework is astride a horse, are and remain tenderfoots. I used myself to be something of a rider once, though it is not for me to say so, and age has withered my once 132 TWEED SUITS, ET AL. good performance. I am something of a horseman yet, but old army wounds have kept me out of the saddle now some live years past, and threaten to end what for nearly four decades has been my happiest pastime. I have long ago yielded my place to the younger generation, to whose sturdy courage and fast growing skill I yield my very honest admiration. But though they must increase as I must decrease, they will not take it amiss if I descant upon what I once could do, and still well know, though performance be of the past; and they will not feel that I criticise unkindly. From the mass of chatty chaff they may perhaps glean a few kernels of grain ; for it has not fallen to the lot of every horseman to study the horses of so many lands. Moreover, I fancy that my hand has not yet lost its cunning ; and that, when I find a promising young horse, I can still vie with many another man in making him a perfect saddle-beast. I should scarce dare compete with the rough -riding "trainer" or the bronco- buster ; but I feel that I might still accomplish results in the way of the niceties of equitation. The Mexican gentleman, like most Southerners, is a good rider within his limits. He is the very reverse of the Englishman, who, with his reductio ad simplicitatein of everything, has stripped the beauties of equestrianism to the bone. With his tweed suits and his brusque man- ners, with his disregard of everything which lends a touch of charm to daily life, he has driven out much that is beautiful and more that is gallant in social and equestrian pleasures alike. With lace ruffles and buckled shoes have quite disappeared not only the beauties of equitation, but the graceful outward courtesies to the other sex ; and the place of the latter has not been filled by the acknowledg- ment conveyed in the cavalier manner now in vogue that women have grown in wisdom to the point of taking care GENTLEMAN RIDER ON THE PASEO DE LA REFORMA OLD-FASHIONED POLISH 135 of themselves. Women are glad, no doubt, of some eman- cipation, but does she whom we love and admire as the real woman of to-day want to be left to her own resources any more than did her grandmother? Has she tired of the willing ministration of the other sex? We have by no means lost our heart courtesies, but whither has the old-fashioned polish taken its flight? We are indebted for much to the Old Country ; do not let us borrow too largel3\ Despite our ante helium accusation that the South affiliated with the British aristocracy, the Southron has retained his gallantry to women, as we of the Eastern States, to our serious detriment, have not. The best rule in equitation, as in other arts, is first the useful, then the ornamental ; but, having the useful, by no means let the ornamental elude you, unless the twain be incompatible. Our artist has drawn the typical rider on the Paseo de la Reforraa, the Rotten Row or Harlem Lane of the City of Mexico. It is to be regretted that telegraph and rail- road are spoiling national types. Whatever country is invaded by news and cheap clothing loses first its na- tional costume and then its national characteristics. Can you remember how things looked forty j^ears ago on the Continent of Europe? You could tell an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, an American as far as you could see him. Not so to-day. The travelled man is cast in about the same mould, and unless the type is pronounced, all na- tions look more or less alike. The rubbing up against one another of the various nations robs each of the piquancy it used to possess. Italy to-day is no longer the Italy you once posted through in your own carriage ; and Mexico is ffoino' the same road. In another decade there will scarcely be a sombrero left. But one still sees an occa- sional swell who clings to his national costume, and a fine bird he is, too, afoot or a-horseback. 136 EQUESTRIAN AIRS In tliis style ride both the statesman and the swell, the banker and, when he can afford it, his clerk. And very much so rode the Englishman of half a century ago. I have of late years heard excellent English horsemen brush aside all reference to the high -school of equitation as worthy only of a snob. But there were some very decent "snobs" in England back in the thirties, when celebrated members of both Houses, the leaders of fashion, the most noted generals — the very heroes, indeed, who had beaten Boney — and every one pretending to be in the social swim would go }3rancing up and down the Row, passaging, piaffing, traversing, to the admiration of all beholders. The brave men who served under Wellington and Nelson were not cut on the tweed- suit pattern by any means. Even the M. F. H. fell into the trick of it in the park. They were not called snobs then ; the initial letter was dropped ; and when a Briton slurs at the better education of the horse to-day, he casts a stone at his own ancestry over the shoulder of the lover of the high-school. I shall recur to this high-school business. The first thing; in our Mexican friend which strikes us is his horse. This is not the bronco of the plains. He is evidently imported from Spain, or lately bred from im- ported stock without that long struggle for existence which has given the pony his wonderful endurance and robbed him of every mark of external beauty. Here we revert to the original Moorish type. The high and long- maned crest, arched Avith pride, the full red nostril, large and docile eye, rounded barrel, high croup, tail set on and carried to match the head, clean legs, high action, and per- fect poise. How he fills our artistic eye, how we dwell upon him ! — until we remember that performance comes first, beauty after, and that the English thorough-bred, which can give a distance to the best of this exquisite A CLOTIIES-PIN KIDER 137 creature's family and beat him handily, has developed from the same blood far other lines than these ; or, indeed, that the meanest runt of a plains pony, on a ride of one hundred miles across the Bad Lands, would leave the beautiful animal dead in his tracks full twoscore miles behind ! There is one point in which our steed is not Moorish^ and it was the Moorish horse, or Barb, which came across with the Spaniards. This is the croup and tail. The Barb carries a poor tail ; it is the Arabian whose tail is so high-set. And in Spain, too, the tail is, as a rule, low-car- ried, showing its evident origin. You must cross the Lib- yan desert to the east before you get the best tail. And in Mexico one does not often see as perfect a croup as the saddle-beast depicted. He may have been imported from the Orient. The Mexican swell rides on a saddle worth a fortune. It is loaded with silver trimmings, and hanging over it is an expensive xerapa, or Spanish blanket, which adds to the magnificence of the whole. His queer-shaped stirrups are redolent of the old mines. His bridle is in like man- ner adorned with metal in the shape of half a dozen big silver plates, and to his bit is attached a pair of knotted red-cord reins, which he holds high up and loose. He is dressed in a l)lack velvet jacket, fringed and embroidered with silver ; and a large and expensive sombrero, perched on his head, is tilted over one ear. His legs are incased in dark tight-fitting breeches, with silver button and chain trimming down the side seams, but cut so as, in summer weather, to unbutton from knee to foot and flap aside. His spurs are silver, big and heavy and costly, and fitted to buckle round his high -cut heel. Under his left leg is fastened a broad-bladed and beautiful curved sword, with a hilt worthy an hidalgo. 138 RISING TO A TROT The seat of the average Mexican exquisite is the perfect pattern of a clothes-pin. Leaning against the cantle, he will stretch his legs forward and outward, with heels depressed in a fashion which reminds one of Sydney Smith's saying, that he did not object to a clergyman riding if only he rode very badly and turned out his toes. It is the very converse of riding close to your horse. In what it origi- nates it is hard to guess, unless bravado. The cowboy, with an equally short seat and long stirrups, keeps his legs where they belong, and if his leg is out of perpendicular, it will be so to the rear. Not all Mexicans ride the clothes- pin seat. There are many riders of good style to be seen in the City of Mexico, and there are good horsemen. But when the pure Mexican rider puts on a bit of " side" he is deliciously ungainly in a horseman sense, though always picturesque to the every-day beholder. The rack rarel3% the canter all but universally, is ridden by the Mexican. It is only the Englishman and those he has taught who ride what can be called a trot. With all others the trot is a mere jog, though a good open trot is one of the easiest gaits for a horse to go, and, risen to, one of the most delightful on the road. Luckily, as the horses of the world gain in breeding by the infusion of English stock, so the world is learning the English habit of rising. When I was a school-boy in Prussia I was fairly hooted out of rising to a trot, a habit I had previously learned in Eng- land. But now you see the Prussians — all the Continental officers, in fact — riding d VAnglaUe in full uniform, and one may see a lancer or hussar trotting through the streets with a handful of despatches, leaning over his horse's neck and rising to tiie gait in a fashion which would have court- raartialled him in the old ramrod Anglophobia days of Frederick William IV. For all they laugh at England for her military ])retensions, they adopt many good things TROT AND CANTER 139 from her, not the least of which is the course of cross- country riding which all foreign officers are now required to take ; or rather a course of as near its requirements as non-lmnting countries can conjure up. Jumping has al- ways been part of the drill of the *Prussian cavalryman ; but since the growth of English ideas this exercise has been broadened and made more of. It is, however, not mere jumping of a thirty -incli obstacle but steady drill which really helps shake a man into his saddle in the form needed for cavalry evolutions. The canter of the Mexican is the old park canter, with a superabundant use of the curb to make the horse prance and play and show his action. The horse is as fond and proud of this as the rider. The best saddle-horse is, of course, the one which will absolutely follow his master's mood ; upon whose neck the reins can be flung if one wishes to saunter along the road, or if one wishes to dis- mount and rest sub tegmine fagl • and who, at call, can show his paces to the best advantage. Most horses are treated solely as a means of transportation, even in hunt- ing and polo ; few receive the training ever^^ intelligent horse is as much entitled to as the American child to his common schooling. And in a sense the Mexican has edu- cated his horse to better advantage. Because his horse is prancing it is no reason why we should look down upon him. He is doing nothing more than the men who used to go titupping down Rotten Row every line afternoon of fifty years ago ; and he may be a better rider than he looks. The steady, business-like gaits of the English nag of to-day are in perfect keeping with his rider's business suit ; but you notice that the Mexican wears a differ- ent habit. Why, then, should not his riding be in keep- ing with his dress? This trot and canter controversy is not yet settled. The 140 FAST WALKING Englishman claims that his horse can o^o seven miles on a trot for six he can go on a canter with the same exertion. Our cavalry officers on the plains — and they are the best judges of distance riding alive — have arrived at a similar conclusion, and all long marches are made at alternate walk or trot, or walk alone. Most cavalr}^ does this. It is astonishing how fast a walk can be, not in the excep- tional horse, but in a large body of cavalry. General Forsyth marched four troops of the Seventh Cavalry from Fort Meade, Da., to Fort Riley, Kan., a distance of seven hundred and twenty-nine miles. This was measured by odometers, checked off by the railroad mileage w^hen trav- elling along it. " The maximum rate per hour was 4.91 miles ; the minimum. rate was 3.20 miles. The mean aver- age per hour for the entire march was 4.11 miles. It is to be understood that the gait considered is the walk, as that was the one pursued during the march." Now the speed of the average saddle -beast on a walk is, in the Eastern States, barely three miles an hour, because he is not educated. If you have owned a horse which could walk four full miles, you have been lucky. Most men, walking a three-and-a-half-mile gait, out-pace the riders they meet who are walking their horses. It takes a very busy horse to out-walk a fair pedestrian. Yet here, by training, we have four troops of cavalry averaging over four miles an hour. The trot is unquestionably an easy gait for the horse. But you cannot make a Southerner or a plainsman adopt this theory. The Southern horse goes his so-called arti- ficial gaits, or canters ; you cannot give away a trotter for the saddle. The bronco canters all but exclusively. The matter seems to depend on inbred habit, and compar- ative statistics on the subject, however interesting, could scared v be made accurate. MEXICO OF NO GOOD 141 Altogether, the horsemanship of our neighbor in Mex- ico is not entirely to be commended. That the cattle business originated there, and that that admirable rider, the cowboy, traces his descent to that peninsula, is the best that can be said of the land, in an equine sense. In- deed, Mexico has all but outlived her usefulness. I do not believe that even railroads will do for her what it has been expected they would. Given certain factors of land and people and civilization, such as we understand it, is of no benefit, and cannot be made to grow. XXVI To return to the States, and to follow out the text on which Ave have been so far preaching. It will be accepted as a truism that the man or people that does any given thing the most constantly will be apt to excel in that one thing. Let us apply this to the riding of the Southerner and our own riding in the East. Now the climate and soil, the thicker population, the more industrious habits of the Eastern and Middle States produced excellent roads at a much earlier period than in the South. In fact, there are few places in the South to-day where the highways can be called even tolerable. The soil is intractable for roads. Good roads are wont to be followed by wheeled transportation, poor roads force people to cling to the sad- dle. When the Northern farmer goes to the nearest town he drives, because the roads are good, and he can carry his stuff to better advantage; the Southerner rides, be- cause the roads for a great part of the year are impassa- ble to wheels. This breeds the universal habit of horse- back-work. The same thing applies to women. To visit their neighbors, go to church or shopping in the nearest village, the women must make use of the saddle. This necessity of the country, where the roads are bad, becomes habit of the city, where the roads are better. The South- erner has been in the saddle constantly for many genera- tions, and to-day boys and girls alike ride the colts in pasture with, like the Numidian of old, only a stick to guide them. In the North these conditions and habits RIDING A RECENT FAD 143 ceased long ago. Riding is a mere fashion of very recent origin, though it has acquired such an impetus that it has doubtless come to stay. It is curious how sliort the period is since riding became even a fad, let alone a fashion. I was put on the retired list of the Army, and went to Boston in 1870. As I had always done, I kept up my habit of daily riding, and for years after that time, so unusual was the sight of a man in the saddle, except on procession daj^s, that the urchins on the street used to hoot at me, or even throw a derisive pebble in my wake. Up to 1882 you could count the ha- bitual riders of Boston on your fingers, and it was about the same in New York. For several years I rode in and out of Boston a handsome mare sired by Alexanders " Norman," and the opinion of horseback- work was well voiced by a noted horseman who once said to me, " What are you doing with that mare in the saddle 'I Why, she belongs on the track !" as if you ought not to disgrace a fine horse by throwing your leg across him. Shortly af- ter began the fad, and in a dozen years we have made such vast strides forward that riding now appears to be a matter of ancient history. You surprise a young man to- day by telling him that in 1880 practically no one rode ; yet such was the fact all through the Eastern States. It is noticeable that we Eastern riders are touchy on the subject of equestrianism, like most people not to the manner born. We are fain to believe, perhaps, not that the Southerner knows nothing about riding, but that what he knows is either all Avrong or else not worth our learn- ing. It must be confessed that for the very few years we have been at it we have accomplished wonders, and our riding to hounds, though the poor benighted pack may be all too often wheedled into chasing aniseseed, has, so far as concerns pluck and enthusiasm, grown to be almost be- 144 ENGLISH SADDLE-BEASTS yond criticism. This and polo are the things in which we have made marked progress, and we have done well to take our model from our British cousins, for in these sports they are masters. But in road-riding the English can teach us nothing. Much as the English ride they know little of the niceties of equitation. What is called a good saddle-beast in England will not pass muster among those who breed exclusively for the saddle, and ride vast- ly more. Thoroughly familiar with the saddle, their style of road-riding is none the less far from perfect. They are so permeated with the hunting idea that they are con- stantly riding to cover in the park. Now it is incontestable that the Southerner— though he, too, shows points of criticism, as of necessity any class of riders must do — is on the whole a better model for road- riding than exists elsewhere ; and it is also true that he breeds and trains far better saddle-horses than England has known for two generations. We Yankees are too new and narrow^ in our recently-acquired sport to be able to see this fact, though it is under our very eyes. This is natural enough, for we got our riding fever along with our athletic fad from across the pond, but it is regrettable. Fox-hunting, though on a distinctly cruder plan than in the old countr}^, has been a constant practice in the South for two hundred years ; despite which the English hunt- ing model is indisputably better. But in road-riding the Southern gentleman is far ahead of the Briton as to his gaits and seat and style. A man who hunts regularly rides on the road a half-dozen times to once he follows the hounds ; one Avho hunts occasionally does so a hun- dred times as often. And yet each, as well as the man who never hunts, patterns his seat for the road on the hunting model, which was intended for as different a pur- pose from mere road-riding as the cowboy's. And each SCOPE OF KOAD-RIDING 147 persists in riding a constant, never-varied trot. The nice balance and quick response of the accomplished saddle- beast are overlooked. A horse is nowadays not even permitted to guide by the neck, while as for suppling his croup, or giving him a light forehand, no one ever dreams of it. All this is, to say the least, a distinct loss. Some men deem such education superfluous ; some cross-country men brush such things aside as trivial and unnecessary. The world could doubtless have wagged along without many of the good things it has — Homer, Michael Augelo, Beethoven. But by how much is it better for having them ! So with equitation. The opposition to the horse's education among hunting men is the medieeval outcry of class prejudice. The more liberal the world, the less there is of it ; the more we ride, the more we shall find that a horse well educated is a horse twice told. Our imitation of the English comes of a sincere desire to flatter ; and imitation is what oils the wheels of prog- ress. When we have not what is worthy of imitation at home, let us by all means go abroad ; but when we have the best in our very midst, it is little to our credit to go searching elsewhere. The first duty of the cross-country rider is to save his horse, because the service required of him on each occa- sion of use is exceptionally great. The performance of a good hunter throughout a hard day's sport is very taxing. The road-rider need not seek to save his horse, because he covers but a tithe of the distance at any one time. Hence the rule of the road is that the horse shall, first of all, sub- serve his rider's comfort. The most comfort resides pri- marily in ease, next in variety of gaits. And no one who has learned the Southern gaits can deny their superior ease. The proof lies in the fact that they enable a man to ride without undue exertion in hot as well as cold 148 THE SOUTHERN SEAT weather. To one who knows it, nothing can be more in- spiriting than a fine open trot ; but a horse which can go Southern gaits can trot besides, and, if the rider is as clever as he, without injury to his other paces. The Southern seat is practically the same as the true mihtary seat ; and except that the bridle-hand is wont to be held a trifle too high — which is a habit caught from the high pommel or roll of blankets or other baggage in front of the soldier — this seat, when not exaggerated, is, all things considered, the best for road -riding, and perhaps would enable a man to do a greater variety of things in the saddle than any other one style. And though the English pigskin is perhaps a neater and more available rig for our city needs, the Southerner is, in gaits and style and knowledge of road work, by far the best model for us to copy, as his saddle-beast is the best for us to buy. This question of gaits is one to which Ave shall specially recur when, in our equestrian trip across the water to the original home of the horse, we find the habits that obtain there. XXVII Taking him as tlie type of a class, the Central Park rider has his good points and he has his bad ones. When he is new to his work and over-imitates the English style, he is at his worst ; when he is used to the saddle he throws aside blind imitation and rides well. He steers clear of the showy tendencies of the Gaul, the military flavor which still clings to the civilian Teuton, and the extreme hunting type of the Briton. I am aware that in what I say I am liable to be mis- construed by many of our riding-men, to be looked upon as impregnated with Anglophobia. This is an error. I have lived many years in England, and yield to no man in my admiration for the open-hearted, generous, plucky, prejudiced, self-adoring Briton. But love me love my — horse is unintelligent if proverbial. " How can you love that drunken wretch?" asked a sympathetic friend of a lachrymose wife. " You be still !" came the quick and positive reply; "I love every bone in his body — but con- found his nasty ways !" Here is a neat distinction. We may love our British cousin and yet not adopt his style. There is no better horseman than the Briton, no better rider. Few are as good. At his own sports — hunting and polo and racing — he may almost be said to be unequalled. But from these premises one must not draw the conclu- sion that he is master of everything else. Too many hard-riding English cross-country men have found on our plains that they could not hold a candle to the average 150 BRITON VS. SOUTHRON cowboy, to make this assumption safe. Yery few English cavahy officers could ride across our plains as our own have learned by rough experience to do. And the color which fox-hunting lends to road -riding seriously limits the average Briton's skill in the park. Still the best rider of England is well worthy of imitation. The trouble with our 3"oung men, whose few months in the saddle makes them feel as if they had nothing more to learn, is that they imitate the English groom — and the poor one at that — and not the English gentleman. As well study art from prize - package chromos! Some of the tricks which one sees taken up from time to time have their origin among the poorest horsemen. The elbows akimbo or the swinging legs illustrate my meaning. Of course Swelldom must have a new shibboleth every now and then. Hands must be shaken just so, or liats must be taken off or kept on by some mystic rule, or some un- meaning lingo must be used at meeting or parting. This is all well enough as a pastime, or as a cachet of the order, as a password ; but when tricks in the saddle are adopted from some questionable source, they may in truth indicate that a man belongs to a certain clique, but they do not demonstrate that he knows how to ride. And this last happens to be the point of view we are tak- ing. Such things are as harmless as they are ephemeral, but it must be expected that they will evoke the smile rather than the admiration of those who know. To recur to our British- Southron controversy, and put- ting aside the peculiar uses of tlie English seat, let us sup- pose an Englishman and a Southerner passing under the eye of an unprejudiced Arab, a man riding in the style of neither and yet a born horseman. The former trots by on his rangy thorough-bred, with stirrups short, leaning over his horse's withers, both hands busy willi his reins, but -% A HUNTING MAN SOUTHERN GAITS 16a showing entire familiarity with and control of his splen- did mount, and his legs perhaps swinging to and fro with the motion. The latter comes along on an equally well- bred horse with longer leathers, upright in the saddle, one hand with a single curb hghtly reining in his quickly moving single-footer. Though the Arab is used to both the shorter stirrups and the leaning seat, think you he would hesitate on pronouncing the Southerner the more graceful and experts It is not that the Englishman is not a good pattern, but that for road-riding we have a better one at home. Assertions such as these are wont to provoke a sneer from the Anglonianiac ; but a sneer is not argument ; it is the resort of ignorance. Answer there is none, unless a man will in the same breath main- tain that education is unfitted for a horse, as some assert that it is lost on women. Despite our slight veneer of Anglomania, however, we are sound American within, and shall not long neglect what can be taught us by our own countrymen, who have been in the saddle as many generations as the English, and been compelled to a much greater degree to use horses for daily work as well as pleasure. One may see it coming now. The Kentucky horse is by no means as often despoiled of his accomplish- ments when he reaches a New York owner as he used to be, and a better welcome is given him at the Horse-show. But either the Southern gaits should be recognized as suitable ones for a park hack in addition to the walk, trot, and canter, or else a special class should be provided. It is a mistake to overlook these gaits— the most universally employed of any among all peoples which are adepts in horsemanship. I have often seen in England a man who prided himself on the speed of his park -hack's walk. He called it a " walk " — so would a Southerner ; but it was a " running- 154 A RUNNING-WALK walk," not a flat-footed one, which, as horses sometimes will, his nag had inherited from some distant ancestor or picked up of his own accord. No horse, except one spe- cially trained, walks flat-footed more than four miles an hour. The running-walk will add a mile or a mile and a half to this speed. The Englishman saw no difference, even if it was an amble or a rack his horse fell into ; he still called it a walk, because it was neither trot nor can- ter. But the flat-footed walk, the running-walk, the am- ble, and the rack are all as distinct as trot and canter. The English in Egypt will ride the racking donkey week in, week out, and yet I never met one who knew why the little fellow was so easy, or what gait he was going. They Avill condemn in the horse what they like in the ass. These so-called artificial paces are not such in fact. Every horse under the excitement of the whip or of fright will fall into one or other of them. Every people which habitually rides at a walk — i.e., travels on horse- back — trains the horse, by simple urging, into these paces ; even the ass -colts in Southern Europe or in the Orient running-walk. I have seen many a racker of true ISTor- man blood. You find the gaits among all sorts and con- ditions of horses; but the Southerner has caught the idea, and has developed it into an art ; he has trained his sad- dle-beasts to perfect paces, and has bred for their perpetu- ation. These are no more artificial than the trot, which is, indeed, by some of the best English authorities, pro- nounced an artificial gait. The marvellous Cossack pony " Seri," whom Sotnik Dmitri Peshkof rode in the winter of 1890-91 across Siberia from the Pacific to St. Peters- burg, five thousand five hundred miles, in one hundred and ninety-three days — over twenty-eight miles a day, includ- ing several detentions, or thirty-seven miles per travelling day, mostly on roads covered with snow-drifts — was a 'PEA VINE- 155 running-walker, and did the bulk of the distance at this gait. This is one of the very best records of extreme dis- tance ridden on the books — meaning a course of thousands rather than hundreds of miles. No comparison of endur- ance required can well be instituted between this perform- ance and the heretofore quoted ride of three hundred miles in three consecutive nights, repeated weekly for six months and over, though the latter strikes me as by far the greater feat ; for the average per day is nearly forty- three miles for an equal or longer period, and the exer- tion of the long night rides vastly more taxing. My daughters for years rode a noble little thorough-bred Kentucky saddle-horse, handsome as a picture and easy as a cradle, who could walk flat-footed four miles and a half in sixty minutes ; could running-walk five and a half, rack seven, single-foot up to twelve, and in harness or under saddle trot a 'forty-gait as square as any horse ever shod. This does not count his canter and gallop, manners, or divers other accomplishments. Each gait was so distinct that you could call it out by a word or a turn of the bridle- wrist, and tell it from the others with your eyes shut. "Was " Pea Vine" not a better park hack than if he were confined to the plain walk, trot, and canter? And yet most of our Eastern fashionables would answer nay, and on general principles our above -cited Briton would sneer at the idea of riding "artificial" g-aits, thouo'h he has, without knowing it, been felicitating himself on his nag's possessing such a gait. I must, however, say that I think a Briton would be more open to conviction by a proper demonstration than some of our home imi- tators of his methods. It is odd how obtuse even an old horseman can be who has not studied these gaits. I have seen judges at horse- shows and prize competitions give a walking prize to a 156 KNOWLEDGE OF GAITS running-walker over flat-footed walkers who were going a superb gait. (3f course the '" runner " (as they often call him for short south of Mason and Dixon's line) out- footed the others. You might as well give a j)rize for speed to a horse who won a trotting race at a gallop. The amble is often called a walk. " You have no idea how easy and fast my new horse can walk !" I have fre- quently heard from people whose recent purchase couldn't walk three miles an hour, but would anible a four and a half gait. Perhaps it is no wonder. I have known few horsemen who could analyze the several gaits, though they might recognize them. It was only when Muy- bridge's lens told the story that people found out how a horse moves his feet at a gallop. I think I have met not exceeding half a dozen men in the course of my life who could describe the sequence of a horse's feet at every gait, the intervals at which they reach the ground, and especially what a horse does when he changes gaits or changes lead in the canter or gallop, though I have met thousands who knew all the gaits blindfolded. These are pleasant technical studies, but they are perhaps rather beyond the domain of essential knowledge. AVe do not need to be philological critics in order thoroughly to enjoy "Hamlet.'^ It is not through lack of technical knowledge, but by dis- regard of the thing itself that the refinements of equita- tion have disappeared. The day of practical horsemanship has come, and well it is perhaps. No one doubts the superiority for average use of a hack well trained a VAnglaise over the nervous, fidgety, watch-springy creature of the high-school. But is there not a middle point between ignorance and over- training ? A small amount of knowledge of a great art, or intimacy with a small art, are wont to make the pos- sessor " feci liis oats." " Oh, you ])lay the vioHn, do you?'^ BANJO F>b'. VIOLIN 157 says the chappie who carries a felt-covered banjo under his arm on the wa\^ to the sea-side, or to an evening call on some pretty girl ; '" the fiddle isn't of much account nowadays." It is true, is it not ? And^ yet when a man has devoted over forty years to the instrument, has played the sonatas of Beethoven and Mozart for a generation, and owns a Stradivarius, does not this crude criticism sound harsh ? The pit}^ of it is that life is not long enough to explain the ABC of music to the banjoist. Certes, he can amuse his audience better than the man with the bow, who has not the remotest desire to compete with him ; but is it because the violin is not the superior instrument, or because the pla3^er and audience lack equal cultivation i Tliat there is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance is recognized by even the violinist, but — well, I was going to say that the Imnjo- liorse is a capital mount for the banjo-boy or the banjo- girl ; but if a man with loving persistence has embraced his Cremona for twoscore years, has drawn forth its deli- cate tones as a comfort through the gloom of nights of sorrow, and has burst forth with it at the daybreak of re- newed hope in anthems of gladness, both his soul and the quivering song-laden wood wrapt in mutual affectionate bliss, he prefers this poet of instruments to the banjo ; Avhen a man has once studied equitation in its finer feat- ures, and has trained his horses to perfect gaits and man- ners, he prefers the educated steed. But we have not yet reached the point where brains go for as much as money, or for what some people are pleased to call Society, though we are fast getting there. The Chinese are ahead of us ; among them the school-master ranks as he should. When one thinks of the society which clusters about our College g'reens and the world-famous work which emanates from their studious closets, and then goes to his book-shelves, 158 ANCESTRY takes down a certain light blue book, entitled Society As I Have Found It, reads a page or two, and then contem- plates this outcome of what some people consider all that is choicest, may he not truly rejoice that his life's ticket is numbered in the thousands and not within four hundred ? Did not the genial Autocrat say some- thing- anent the clergymen and doctors — the Brahmins — of New England being good enough ancestry for any one ? And is not a pedigree honestly traced back to the brave men who landed at Plymouth Rock better than a coat of arms got up by a heraldry expert (!) for some nouveau riche who doesn't know who was his great- grandfather ? I for one am proud that ray grandfather was pastor of First Church, Haverhill, and that my great-grandfather was one of the heroes of Bunker Hill ; but I would give more to-day for old Seth Pomeroy's anvil, or the vice which clamped the muskets he repaired for the Massachusetts militia, than for the sword he wore as a colonel in the French wars. The Dodge who landed with the Salem company in 1G29 is a forebear who satisfies all my ambition for ancestry. If we Americans cease to be proud of the thew and sinew of our forefathers, of the soil and the laws which have brought forth such a man as Abraham Lincoln and made him President of the Republic, what have we left ? Are we to become a plutocracy pure and simple ? XXYIII When we reach the cross-country rider of our Eastern States, as typified in such hunts as the Genesee Valley, the Meadow Brook, the Radnor, or the Myopia, we touch our hats with a thrill of admiration as the red-coats ride to the meet, and wonder at the genuine Yankee grit and intelligence which have so soon popularized this sport among us. Not that we can have the real article in hunting in our severe northern climate, or under condi- tions which substitute a drag for Reynard's nimble legs and cunning twists and turns. Still, it is rare that a fox in our Eastern States will give you as good a run as a drag. The country is such that you cannot ride over it in ever}'- direction at will, as you can in England, and a fox has so many covers near at hand that you can never be sure of even a short run. This does not apply to the Genesee Valley. Fox-hunting there is the rule, and a drag is laid only to accommodate those who ride to jump fences in- stead of jumping fences because they are hunting across a country and won't be left behind. But the boldness, skill, and enthusiasm of our hunting -men are beyond praise, and there is plucky riding and good among them. It is, moreover, certain that in no part of the Old Country is there such breakneck timber as we find in several of our hunts — say the Meadow Brook. I have often thought that as fine an exhibit of horse- manship as can be found is that of the middle-aged Eng- lish country -gentleman, who has ridden to hounds since 160 AMERICAN FOX-HUNTING boyhood, has outgrown the dare-devil, and lost somewhat of the muscle and elasticity of his youth, but who still, by his fine sense of the capacity of his horse, his light hands, and perfect judgment, is able to keep in the next field with the hounds tliroughout a long run over a stiff coun- try. As there is perliaps no animal equal to the best hunter in his all-round qualities, unless it be an Al Ken- tucky combined horse, so there is perhaps no more perfect thing in equitation tlian this intelligent riding. It soars above the breakneck performance as a line of Milton above the epic of Commencement. "We do not often see this kind of thing here ; the dare-devil still predominates : but none the less, hail to the youth and strength and man- liness which have sought an outlet in this splendid sport ! A generation ago tlie same spirit thronged the tented field, and marched up to the Bloody Angle with teeth set and heart aglow with heroic passion. And it is this true Anglo-Saxon mettle which can always be relied on to come to the fore in our times of need. May it never die out ! In a few sections of country fox - hunting is older ; in fact, has become not only almos.t an hereditary sport, but one in which the farmers take an equal part and interest. This is as it should be. Hunting can never thrive when only the rich may indulge in it. When a country is so stiff that none but exceptional horses can get over it, and a field is limited to a dozen men on nags averaging a couple of thousand dollars each, it is hard to see a future in the sport. Were it not for some localities where the sport has run through a generation or two, even though thei'e has been no regular Hunt and M. F. IT., one would fear its extinction when fashion shall have brought some other form of athletics into prominence. But it is probable that hunting has taken linn j'oot ; and though our climate can- GENTLEMAN RIDER IN CENTRAL PARK BIG OR LITTLE HORSES? 163 not be coaxed, nor foxes quickly bred, there is small dan- ger that the riding part of the sport will soon be lost. This sport has shown us wliat capital material we have in this country for hunters. Our American horses are wonderful in their serviceableness. They have done bet- ter across our country than the expensive imported Eng- lish and Irish ones. The difficulty of acclimation of the latter has something to do with this ; but few things have shown the adaptability of our stock to any Avork better than the number of horses of trotting blood that have turned out fast gallopers, big timber-jumpers, and stayers besides. There seems to be a growing tendency to breed for size. May it not be a mistake ? It is doubtful if the hunter of over sixteen hands averages as well, all things considered, as the one which is somewhat under this measure, though big thorough-breds are needed for some men. Certainly, for plain saddle- work fifteen -two is a better size, com- manding vastly more activity if less stride. Moreover, big horses are not always weight -carriers any more than they are weight -pullers. The work of the world is done, the speed of the world is attained, the races of the world are won, by the smaller specimens; but to-day's fashion is set for either a polo -pony or a sixteen-and-a-half hands thorough -bred. The ten inches between the two are skipped, though the best performances have almost inva- riably been between these two limits and well under the higher one. I may here say a word anent the American horse as a racer. Some Englishmen are wont to underrate our cli- mate, so far as it relates to horse-breeding ; but this has nev- er been a country of racing. Our national sport has, until latel}^, been trotting ; and a country which has produced a "Sunol," an "Arion," and a "Nancy Hanks," may well 164 AMERICAN THOROUGH-BREDS claim pre-eminence for its effect upon the horse. There is nothing in breeding to parallel our reducing trotting speed from 2.26^ by "Lady Suffolk" — which many men still remember to have seen — down to " Nancy Hanks's " 2.05 in 1892. Nor need we feel like taking a back seat in racing. We have had altogether too much good-luck, even by our second-raters, on English turf, to feel discouraged, and our records are of the very best. So good an author- ity as Count Lehndorf, in his Horse -Breeding Recollec- tions^ says : "Experience points to America as the source from which to draw in future the regenerating fluid, for, al- though the American thorough-bred takes its origin from England, and is still more or less related to its English prototype, the exterior appearance and the more recently shown superiority of American horses lead to the conclu- sion that the evidently favorable climate, and the, to a great extent, virgin soil of America — in every respect dif- ferent from ours — gradually restore the whole nature of the horse to its pristine vigor, and make the American racer appear eminently qualified to exercise an invigo- rating influence on the condition of the thorough-breds of the mother- country, enfeebled, perhaps, by oft-repeated inbreeding." This is from a source entirely impartial, and one often quoted in England. XXIX "We have during the past dozen years drawn from our tap of Anglomania a mug brimful of good. How easy it is to blow away the froth which rests on the excellent draug'ht below ! One of the most exhilarating of our im- ported sports is polo, and as it happens that our plains furnish so excellent a mount, and our increasing out-of- doors habits so many players, the game may well become a national one. The motto of the day in English sports is speed. Fox-hunting of the last generation was a mod- est performance at a hand gallop ; Sir Roger de Coverley rode to hounds at a canter. But within twoscore years the cross-country pace has been run up to racing speed. More and more thorough blood has been called for in both park and field, and the old-fashioned hunter of our sires could not live through the shortest burst to-day. The same thing applies to polo — the faster and more able the pony the better the performance of his rider. You can get enormous weight -carrying capacity in an un- derbred pony, as well as remarkable endurance, but not at speed. When you call on a fourteen-hands pony to carry a hundred and sixty pounds and upwards at speed, you must have blood. Even the veriest weed of an undersized thorough-bred will do wonders in this way. Tlie sudden bursts of racing pace called out at polo have made the English breed for small thorough-breds. Capital polo mounts have been raised from the handy little Exmoor pony with blooded sires. More barrel comes of tiiis cross 166 ENDURANCE AT SPEED together with a certain hardiness ; but the little knife- blade thorough-bred will often carry as big a man, and en- durance at speed is the inheritance only of his race. These words, in fact, sum up that peculiar quality which has not yet been reached in any other animal, except, perhaps, in the greyhound. But when we say thorough-bred there is a limited and a broader meaning. The pure Arabian is not, quoad the Stud Book, a thorough-bred ; (jaoad blood he is so. But to speak of the good blood in the plains pony sounds absurd until you reflect upon where he came from. So much for the English pony. When we come to riders, it will be many years before we can boast the skill of our transatlantic cousins, or either of us that of the Japanese, with their light cup -wands for mallets and feather-weight balls. The American polo -fields by no means exhibit the play you see in England. Many a man here indulges in recklessness which would warn him off the ground at Ilurlingham, though our cracks are really experts. It takes years at the game to produce the at- mosphere which breeds perfection, and in the twenty it has been played in England it has wellnigh reached this point. But it is well to persevere. We are making marked progress in all our sports, and polo may yet become as much of a national game as base-ball, tliough let us hope without its commercial aspect. The American polo -pony is no other than our little bronco friend. Many come from Texas, Wyoming, Mon- tana. The clever cow-pony is ready trained for the ])olo- ground. ITe will catch the idea of the game as quickly as he caught the trick of cow-punching, and he has al- ready learned to stop and turn and twist as only he can do. It must not be forgotten that he has precisely the same blood in his veins which has placed the English thor- ough-bred so far above all other horses. He has increased Ii__ ■-t' A SORRY SPECIMEN 169 his stock of endurance and hardiness by his struggle for existence on the plains, and for this game he is, perhaps, the equal of any pony, whatever his breeding, and within the limits of the polo-field his speed is as great — some good judges say greater. That is an open question. He is fast enough. When he is taken off the cars on arrival here from his familiar haunts on the cattle-ranges, he is the sorriest, gauntest, most miserable equine specimen one can find in a day's tramp. He doesn't look worth a peck of oats. But he will reward your care. In a month or two you would never guess your plump, handsome, able little pony to be the same individual. You cannot kill a bronco. 'No other animal will recover from such Strapazen, as the Germans phrase it. And when he has undergone the tort- ure of docking, and is finally invested with the pig-skin, nothing but the brand remains of the ragged little hero of the plains. The pony is used to a single gag-bit ; but he is tracta- ble in his own odd way, and not a few will learn to work perfectly in a snaffle. So many of our polo -players re- quire the bridle as a means of support that the loose rein of the cowboy will by no means do. The perfect polo- rider has not yet made his appearance. Under him the bronco would more quickly become the perfect polo- pony. It Avould take but a few months' training to teach him to guide by the legs alone, if need be. Indeed, his Indian master made him do just this. He learns to fol- low the ball in a few days. There is no sport in which training would be better rewarded than in polo, and though it would be useless to aim at the delicacy of the haute ecole — for the sharp runs and stops of polo make this as practically impossible as it is in hunting — still, given a rider w^ith perfect seat, without a suspicion of 170 THE POLO SEAT riding the bridle, and a pony which was taught to guide by leg-pressure alone, and it would seeiu that they should, other things being equal, be the best players in the game. The polo-player's seat varies very little from the nat- ural, and the best of them are consummate horsemen. Few things call out good riding more than polo ; nothing trains a man quicker or better. While hunting can never attain more than an imitative standing in our rigorous climate, polo may become domesticated, and, except that it must be played on ponies, is as good an educator in horsemanship. XXX If there is any one kind of riding between the worst of which and the best there is a great gulf fixed, it is the jockey's. Unless that demolisher of pet traditions and shams— instantaneous photography — had shown us the extremity to which bad jockeyship could be carried, we should scarcely credit the mechanical ])ossibility of some of the positions the track-rider can assume. The average jockey has no more to do with winning a race than the time -keeper — in a neck -and -neck race by no means so much. You will see him suspended, as it were, in four- fold straps — his stirrups and the bridle-reins — one quadru- ped bestriding another, and not the more intelligent atop. He relies as much on the reins as he does on the leathers, and has no control over his horse, no power to save or coax him whatsoever. Considering who the jockeys are, what their training is, and what the average race is like, this is no great wonder. But Fordham and Cannon and Archer did not ride this way, not to mention older celeb- rities ; nor do our own better jockeys. It is a thousand pities that we have no photographs of Archer stealing one of his celebrated races. The ability to ride a puller in a snaffle-bridle, or to win with a slack rein without whip or spur, is as unusual as the art of coaxing a horse, and of making the most of his courage or nervousness or obsti- nacy. How many modern jockeys study their horses, or can cut and whip a race out of a slug, or wheedle it out of a sulky jade? They use steel and whalebone on the will- 172 A PHENOMENAL JOCKEY ing and unwilling alike. Delicate mouth-touching is the rarest of the jockey's arts ; almost every jockey here " rides twice as fast as his horse is going." "Waiting races are not run in America. Running is made from start to finish in the majority of cases. But when a race is run between a few good jockeys, this rule is not always followed. There has as yet been no phe- nomenal jockey produced in the States ; but it may fairly be claimed that our best jockeys come well up in the second rank. Do not misunderstand this phrase. Among great captains only Alexander, Ceesar, Hannibal, Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick, and Napoleon are placed by the best critics in the first rank ; such men as Philip, Pompey, Turenne, Marlborough, Prince Eugene, Welling- ton, Lee, and Von Moltke come only in the second rank, which, after all, is good enough for any one but a demigod. That the common jockey here is less good than in Eng- land is smiply due to the fact that there he serves at least a species of apprenticeship, while here he springs full- armed from his own brain. Please note that I am not undertaking to criticise the riding of our better jockeys ; I have seen some beautiful work at home. I purposely use no names, lest some should think me partial or unsound — you see I am wise in my generation — and refer only to individuals who are now translated. Nor am I an habitue of the race-track; I do not consider my opinion the ultima thule on this sub- ject, as I might on — well, never mind now. But that we have not had a man who could, by his profession alone, before he had got within a distance of middle life, accu- mulate a fortune of over a million dollars, is clear; yet Archer did it. With our running-horses we have done great things ; our American records are not to be ques- tioned, and we need not be ashamed of our records in Ml A PHENOMENAL DRIVER 175 England, from the days of game " Prioress " down. But Avhile we have had truly phenomenal drivers of trotting- horses — among the dead let me piously refer to that noble horseman, Hiram Woodruff — ^I do not think we can claim to have developed a genius among jockeys. It is perhaps no wonder, for great as are the strides made by us in raising and running thorough-breds, the sport is not what it is in England ; whereas trotting has long been our national sport, and at this we are so far beyond the rest of the world that trotters from any other part of the globe are " not in it." Those beautiful black Orloifs which came over from Russia to out-trot us some twenty years ago, and which were really able ten or twenty milers, were simply nowhere. They would have gone into the 'thirty class. In olden times cathedrals were built, as they cannot be to-day, because then the w^hole sentiment, love, and am- bition of the people were centred in the work. Unless a thing is a national institution, so to speak, it can never become truly great, as it surely will if it is upheld by the entire community. So with any sport. Base-ball thrives in America, cricket in England, because each evokes the popular interest. Racing is a more national affair in Great Britain than it is with us. XXXI . There have always been in America a few isolated ex- ponents of the high-school of equitation. Very naturally they have as a rule been foreigners, in most cases riding- school teachers, sometimes men stranded on our coasts with no resource but what they had learned in better times at home. In our old regular army there used to be many high -school riders; to-day there are few; the old style has given out with us as it has in England. We are in the era of the practical ; the artistic has been lost sight of. ]S"o doubt this is for the best ; it is our immense American practicality which has taught the world what the doctrine of the greatest good to the greatest number can accomplish. But, stripped of all its artistic qualities, life becomes sadly prosaic ; and no one, I ween, will claim our age of telegraph and telephone, of sixty miles an hour on the rail, and five hundred knots a day at sea, to be an artistic age. When a painter cannot, for love or money, buy colors ^vlucll have not in some measure been adulter- ated, how can he expect his pictures to last ? The old Dutch masters of the fourteenth century still show up in their original colors, as bright and glowing as the day they were laid on. It is a serious question whether any canvas or fresco produced to-day can last two genera- tions. We can indeed build a Brooklyn Bridge, but whom could we select to decorate a Vatican? The higii -school rider does not thrive because he fails to appeal to our practical side. He will begin by telling THE HIGH-SCHOOL AIRS l77 you that it will take you five years to learn the rudi- ments of horsemanship, when 3'ou want to ride vv'ith the hounds, at least as far as the first wall where you and your steed part compan}^, so soon as the next fixt- ures are made ; and as a result you turn your back on his manege and go to a more humdrum school. You want to ride a la hanjo — and right you are ! At his best, however, this rider is in his wa}^ more of an artist than any other man who makes horsemanship his profession. My former simile of playing the violin is distinctly applicable to him. Some of the work he can do is like Paganini's " Carnival of Venice ;" some of it like a smooth adagio of Kiicken. The art to-day threatens to be lost ; there are few masters left, but we have had some American experts who have done great things. Fancy bringing a horse to such a degree of confidence in your power and his own that you can back him up to an obsta- cle, however small, and make him jump it backward! Yet this has been done, while the trot and gallop back- ward have always been high - school airs. By trotting and galloping backward I do not mean that a horse at- tains any speed ; he merely takes the gait, i.e. uses his feet in the true sequence of the gait, and progresses backward at a very slow rate. Nor is it a gallop ; it is more prop- erly a canter or a prance. The name " gallop backward '' was given when the mechanical action of the gallop was not understood, and it still clings. The chief point of criticism of the school-rider is per- haps that he is too little tolerant of the knowledge of others. This is a common error in artists of every pro- fession. "They were all wrong, those old chaps I" is still the cry of the long-haired fraternity. I speak feelingly because I have at times been imbued with the spirit as I have enjoyed the delights of the high-school. But I have 12 1V8 OLD MAIDS— BLESS THEM! seen too many splendid performers in the saddle all over the world, who were anything but school -men, to have a grain of prejudice left. I think I can see the high- school horse and his rider as they actually are. I once knew a charming old maid in England. And, by-the-way, do you know, my friend, how much you lose by not cultivating the society of old maids? As the med- dlesome mother-in-law has been chosen as the type of a class whose power for evil or good we all recognize, but of which we know many lovely members, so has the physi- cally, mentally, and morally weazened old maid been ig- norantly chosen as a type of a class that is, if you Avill take the trouble to study it, as full of admirable quality as an egg is full of meat. Why some poet has not arisen to sing aloud their virtues I know not. Their very charm is their delicate quaintness. We go wild over a dainty, odd, old-fashioned bit of china— why, that's just what your old maid is, if you'll study the class as much as you have bric-a-brac ! We all crowd round and do homage to a bud, and neglect her maiden aunt yonder. Unquestion- ably the bud has her charms ; what bud has not, carti- laginous though she be? But that it is imitation — emu- lation if you will — rather than judgment which makes us crowd around her, is well shown by the fact that equally charming, and often far more intelligent buds, are at the very moment lying perdues in the corner by the sides of their mammas or their duennas, and sobbing their dear little souls away — if, forsooth, they are not indulging in hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. Moreover, the bud fades or opens, and in either case is lost, while the old maid is perennial, always delightful, always fresh. If you know her not, it is your blindness, not her lack of charm. Study her, friend ; she will reward thee as no tenth part of a popular bud can possibly do. THE POET OF INSTRUMENTS 179 But to my own old maid. Lovely woman, she onoe wrote some charming verses to an entrancing little Danish air I had exhumed from the relics of a deceased musical antiquary — I am talking of thirty-odd years ago, and she was fifteen years my senior then. Well, one day she said, at a concert to which I had taken her at St. James's Hall, where we had listened to Joachim's wondrous playing, " If the organ is the king of instruments, surely the violin is the poet." Now, the high-school rider is much like the violin — mind you, I have not used the word "fiddle," which is quite another instrument, of the banjo order. There is no more delicate thing in the world than a horse's mouth,, and the high-school rider works on its delicacy, while all other riders seek to harden it to their own less sensitive hands. The fact is undeniable ; the hands of the high- school rider are not to be equalled. He must have good hands ; he can accomplish no result without them, l^or is it the light hand and loose rein of the cowboy or Arab, for he feels his horse's mouth at every instant ; he talks to him through the bit as no one else ever can. The jockey stimulates his horse by the bit, sometimes in a marvellous way ; the cross-country rider does the like, and rouses his every power at a difficult obstacle. But the high-school rider talks a language to his steed which is, indeed, Greek to those who have not studied it, which is Homeric in its graceful touch and powerful effect. Associated with this fact is the question whether such a delicate mouth is what one wants. Well — to be quite honest, no ; not as a rule. A man who is travelling needs a Baedecker rather than a Shakespeare ; we admire, if you like, the man wlio reads Browning before breakfast instead of his newspaper ; but — Alas, my steed has positively got hold of the bit again, and I fear he will gallop into yonder chestnut grove. But 180 FENCING xVS AN ART there used, in my youth, to be a story of a Briton who was fed pretty constantly in America on that questionable confection yclept Washington pie. Being of a quiet and unresentf ul habit, he protested not ; but one da}^ after an undue and perhaps underdone infliction of the entremet, he is said to have quietly remarked that " doubtless Gen- eral Washington was a great and good man, but d bis pie !" So with the Browning man. We admire his taste, but — ^do not always agree as to his discretion. Now, a man who is hunting or playing polo cannot pos- sibly utilize or preserve a Browning, i.e., too fine a mouth ; he needs a newspaper-mouth. Both these sports originate in the rough-and-tu,nible instincts of our nature, though now grown somewhat beyond the crudely physical. ]S"ei- ther belongs to the same category as school-riding. They are arts in their way, but not arts in the Avay poetry or painting or music is an art, while school-riding is just this. How many men fence to-day ? I do not mean the broad- sword (tliough there are few enough of these), or that vig- orous if crude imitation of it, single-stick; I mean the foils. It is too delicate, too difficult an art to please most people. We can learn to spar, if we have strength and courage, "■ in six easy lessons." But the small sword, of which foils are the practice- weapon, is tlie study of years and years, and yet years. And it is of that nature, like all true arts, that it is not necessarily lost by age. None of the liner arts depend upon brute strength. When a man grows less able physically, he must yield the palm to the vouuiier men in the coarser arts ; but not so in fen- cing. The crack fencers are almost always middle-aged men, whom stud}^ of their weapon has made perfect, not muscle. It demands patience to study fencing, not mere vigor. So with high-school riding. It is not a sport like THE SPANISH WALK hunting or polo, it is an art like fencing or playing the harp. In these da^^s of sports, fencing and high -school riding are tabooed. Where school-riding is conserved, so is fencing, and vice versa. And, to recur to our initial idea, you do not require the same delicate mouth and hands for the sports that you must have for the art of horsemanship. Again, as to legs and the spur. The only rider who uses his legs for any other purpose than holding on is the school-rider. I do not refer to kicking a horse's croup 182 THE USE OF THE SPUR around by violent use of tlie legs, which the Indian and an occasional civilized rider indulge in. The school-rider's seat is very firm ; it must be so or he cannot acquire or keep light hands ; and in addition to using his legs to keep his seat, he uses them intelligently to talk to his horse. The delicacy of this use of the legs is equalled only by that of the schoolman's hands ; nothing but to study the subject, and then to watch a master of the art ride, can give any idea of what a height this delicacy can reach. It is such that unless you know something of the art 3"0u cannot understand what the master is doing. Any one can see the skill of a rider who pilots his animal over six feet of timber ; any one can appreciate " Hail Columbia " by a bras^-band. But it is not every one who can understand what a master is doing when he makes his horse piaffer ; nor can every one appreciate the over- ture to ''Lohengrin" at its true worth. The spur, moreover, by the school method is used not to punish or urge on the horse, but to convey certain ideas to him. Like the use of the curb-bit, in contradistinction or in addition to the use of the snaffle, the spur finds in the school - rider a new power — one never dreamed of bj" the rough - riding, cross-country man, or by the active, hearty polo-player. There is no question that, so far as the pure art of horsemanship is concerned, the fine work of the high-school rider soars above any mere sport, just as the "finked sweetness" of the 'cello, or the small circle of the small-sword hover above the rugged blows of the single-stick, or the lascivious pleasing of a lute. "Whether there is to any given ])erson more enjoyment in the sport or in the art is a question of eacli man's habits, tastes, and tendencies. I am far from seeking a quarrel with these. Do not imagine, because you give your horse a fairly delicate mouth, that this will necessarily spoil him for an "PATROCLUS 183 occasional bit of rouglier work. By no means. My " Pa- troclus," the instant I took up the reins, used to give me the most deHcate touch of the bit, and keep it so hour after hour; but if I wanted a mile or two with the hounds, I could let out a link of his curb -chain, use the bridoon rather more than the bit, and Pat would take -.%>; CAPRIOLE hold of me enough not to mind a twitch on the bit if, in going over an awkward place, I did the trick less well than he ; and at once, on stopping him, fresh or winded, he was ready to give me his school-head again without fret or bore. Any horse can learn to do — almost as much. What can the high-scliool rider do? you ask. Well, 184 USES OF TPIE SCHOOL lie can do many wonderful, many beautiful, many useful things, not to speak of what he has done for horsemanship in the past. Some of the so-called "airs" of the high- school are truly wonderful — such as the croupade or the capriole, or galloping backwards ; some, such as the piaffer, or the Spanish march and trot, are of singular grace ; and the fact that by a school -training a dangerous horse may be made safe, or a chronic stumbler be tauglit to catch himself always, or the average ungainly, clumsily-moving brute be made light and handy, and responsive to the bit and leo-s, demonstrates its usefulness. Is it not useful to take a puller, or a horse so high-strung that it is a risk for any one to ride him, and make him moderate and safe for even a woman to ride, if she is taught what his training is, and is trained herself? Have you ever watched horses let loose in a pretty paddock after a long confinement in the stable, and paid heed to their free step and splendid bearing? Well, everything they do of their own accord they can be made to do at the bidding of man by a high- school training. All this, you think, has no value except from an artistic stand -point; but neither, it might be claimed, has hunting except as an exercise — in other words, it is art versus exercise. JS^either statement is an argument; and a moderate use of high -school methods lias a distinct value which we will discuss when we come to talk of road-riding as a separate matter. The high-school has been of inestimable use in the past ; to-day, when we think of nothing but athletics, its uses are not so apparent — to the athletic rider. Although it can be theoretically demonstrated that a scliool- rider on a school-horse ought to do anything and everything bet- ter tlian any one else, the truth is that he does not. Given the perfect rider and the perfect horse, and he would, no doubt, do so ; but no horse or rider ever is perfect. It is OIL AND WATER 185 like a republican form of government — perfect in theor\% but mighty hard to make as perfect in practice with a somewhat mixed population; and in the hunting- field it is, even to an expert, practicallj^ impossible to ride on the delicate school -rein. On the polo-gromid it might per- haps be done. A hunter or a polo -pony must not mind frequent and sometimes severe twitches on the mouth ; but twitches, unless your bit is very light, ruin the school- horse. It will not do to forget that each occupies a field by itself, and that art and the sports can hardly mix : they are as unlike as oil and water. Perhaps, to-day, the best uses for school - riding are in winter, when, on days too disagreeable to be out with sat- I // ii " 42i ill y^^f-^^^-ff' CROTJPADE 186 "'FO' DE WAR" isfaction, one may ride in a manege to the manifest gain of man and horse ; or, in the extreme summer heat, the well- ventilated school ring is not to be despised. I wonder, en passant, whether I am living too much in the past. It is the weakness of — shall I say middle age ? I often feel like the old darky who was modestly stand- ing beside a visitor to the " family " on the porch of the old plantation homestead in Virginia one fine bright night when Luna was out in her full majesty. " Isn't that a fine moon, Uncle Joe V said the stranger. " Yes," slowly assented the ancient, now somewhat threadbare servitor, " dat am, fo' shure, a mighty fine moon, Massa Temple, but yo' orter seen dat moon 'fo' de war !" Many a thing seems to have lost a part of its ante-helium flavor in these later days. Draw the rein on me if I offend too much — or, better still, be tolerant. XXXII The chief value of school methods lies in the application of the simplest of them to plain road-riding. The term ''saddle-horse" threatens to be lost. Any man who owns a horse which will allow itself to be ridden, will quietly walk and trot along the road more or less easily, and has endurance and good - temper, sa\^s that he has a saddle- horse, and really thinks so. Every second man will tell you he owns " the best saddle-horse in the State." The hunting-man calls his hunter a saddle-horse; the scrubbiest polo -pony with any sort of manners is so dubbed, and nearly every carriage-horse, too. Now this is all wrong ; the saddle-horse is a creature and a creation j!?(?/' se ; he must be bred and trained as such. Not that it does him any harm to work in light harness now and then — all my saddle -beasts do — but this must be a subsidiary thing. His saddle qualities must be first considered, and every- thing done to conserve them. It is in this that our friends of the Southern States ex- cel. They have distinct breeds of saddle-horses, which for generations they have been improving for this purpose alone, and they have made the strain as nearly perfect as can be. On tlie whole, the Southern "combined" horse, w^hich, in addition to perfect saddle gaits and manners, will work true in harness, is the best general horse in ex- istence. A pair of such, well mated, are beyond price. I have owned a few such pairs, but they are rare, and the difficulty of bringing them East and acclimating them enhances their value and rarity. 188 THE PARAGON What is this paragon that you call a saddle-horse ? you ask me. Let me tell you, but without enlarging upon his '' points," which we all of us know and appreciate alike. If he moves quickly, smoothly, and true at all his gaits, he is all right ; motion is the test. I have seen horses with " points" enough on the stable floor to make you fall down and worship them, that weren't worth a shilling a dozen when 3"ou got them out on the road. " The perfect hack," says my good friend the editor of the Sporting and Dramatic — and I love to quote a thorough horseman — " must have a variety of excellences, such as are very rarely indeed found in one horse." He " bends readily and obediently to the rider's hand, though his neck has never undergone the process of suppling." True, indeed, but how often do you find this rare bird, whose price in the Old Country appears to be about two hundred guineas? Or how many of us can afford to buy him when found ? It is just here that the school comes in and enables 3"ou to buy for a quarter of that sum an average young four or five year old, and in six months of pleasure, for training- is one of the greatest of pleasures, make him the perfect hack. And the veriest Philistine, presupposing intelli- gence, can begin with a green horse and, if he is half as apt at studying his manual as his nag is clever at catch- ing the trick of it, can educate his purchase and himself at the same time. Wliile the price of choice horses in the big marts of Kentucky — such as Lexington, Mount Sterling, or Paris - is to-day very high, you can still buy in the country for from two hundred dolhirs u[)wards a well- sired com- bined colt, who has been taught to " walk," or rack, canter, and trot, and of course to guide by the neck. I recently rode a beautiful three- year- old in Path County, who was fifteen three, as well rounded up as most five-year-olds. now TO TEACH A COLT 189 perfectly broken, who had as exceptional manners as he had beauty, and who was on trial in a friend's hands at one hundred and fifty dollars asking price. I have paid five hundred for less good ones, and would willingly give a thousand for a couple well -mated. Bej^ond simple training the accomplishments of the country horse will not extend ; it is for you to teach him. Or, if you still insist that a trot and canter are all that you want, you can for the same price, or fifty dollars more, buy in i\ew York, Philadelphia, or Boston a nice moving colt, broken to harness, and willing to trot kindly under saddle. The latter will need much more to make him a saddle-horse, for he has had no saddle ancestry. Still it can be done. Where, you say, shall we learn how to teach this colt? Well, now you have asked me a delicate question. But if a man will not cry his own wares, how can he expect others to advertise them for him ? I have tried to tell the how in a little Chat in the Saddle, named after " Patro- clus" and ''Penelope," two capital nags of mine, still alive and at work, hale and hearty, at near twenty years old. And for fifteen years they have not skipped a day's w^ork — or, rather, seen a day when they were not fullv up to a good bit of work. If you want higher training. Col. Anderson's Modern Horsemanshij) will help you. Any of the Baucher manuals will do ; and there are a number of others. But all this is apart, for the Ad. is really not a paid one. How much must the colt learn to be worthy the name of "saddle-horse?" According to my standard the least education which will make him perfect should include : 1. A busy walk, well up to four miles an hour. If your colt is naturally a slow walker — many good ones of trotting ancestry are — and you cannot appeal to his am- bition so as to encourage him into a good walk Avhich he 190 WHAT MUST HE KNOW? Avill maintain of his own accord, he ought to have an am- ble, or a rack, or a running walk. A slow walker under saddle is intolerable. You must have at least one loose- rein gait which gets you along at a minimum of four miles an hour. 2. A quick, active, nimble trot — not the extended flying gait of the trotting track, but one which keeps his legs well under the horse and makes speed by quick gather. Many a thorough-bred Avith very limber fetlocks will trot with a long, rangy gait in the easiest manner possible to himself and his rider. But his other gaits will not be collected enough if he has too rangy an action. His in- heritance is long stride and quick gather, too ; but the former is wanted on the track, not the road. 3. A good canter. Some people think that the faster the horse canters the better. This is all right for a cov- ert-hack, who is to take you as speedily as possible to the appointed place fixed for the meet, where your hunter will be waiting for you, fresh and able. But a saddle- beast's canter is properly measured by its slowness, not its speed. I by no means refer to some of those lazy brutes which can canter as slowly as they walk, and im- press you as being members of the vegetable rather than the animal kingdom. I mean that a horse, who feels fresh enough to jump out of his skin and would prefer a sharp hand -gallop, shall be able to curb his ambition to your mood, and put all his action and elasticity into a five-mile- an-hour canter; that is luxury. But, you object, he is working a ten-mile gait for a five-mile progress. Exactly so. If, my brother, you go riding in order to cover dis- tance, English fashion, you are not doing saddle-work proper, according to my notion. Remember our rule : If you are hunting, you must save your horse, because he has got a big day's work to do; if you are riding, even on "PUTTING ON AIRS" 191 your saddle-horse, to make any considerable distance, regu- late yourself accordingly— but then you are travelling, not riding for pleasure. If you go out for the mere ride, it is for your nag to subserve your comfort, not for you to save his strength. Do you measure a painting by superficies or by execution? Is not a square foot of a Gerard Douw or a Hans Memling worth more than one hundred square feet of — well, let us say even a Rubens, after he had de- scended to political wall-paintings, oblivious of his work in Antwerp? So a saddle-horse's ability is to be measured by his gaits, not the distance he can go. Would you ask to go for a pleasure ride on a " Captain McGown " or a " Nancy Hanks" because, forsooth, the one might take you forty miles in two hours, or the other a mile in 2.05 ? Speed is a corollary of the Sunday rider's problem, not yours and mine, dear boy, when we ride along the pretty suburban roads, or on the soft bridle-paths of the Park. I have often heard it said of a man with a well-trained horse that he appears to be putting on airs. But why is he showing off any more than the man who rides along with his elbows up at an angle of sixty degrees, or swing- ing his legs, or acting as if he were bestriding a Genesee County hunter, when he is atop of a three-dollar livery- hack ? A man Avho makes his horse show his paces with- in reason is as little to be accused of bumptiousness as the other; and if he were, he has a sounder reason for his van- ity. If your nag can canter a well - collected four- mile gait, w^th all the proud bearing w^iich such an accom- plishment lends, why must you let him go an uncollected eight-mile gait, when the slower one is the very poetry of motion? To dub this "putting on airs" is on all fours with the outcry against "those d literary fellers." 4. A rack or singlefoot is not a sine qua non ; but I would vastly rather have a racker who could trot besides, 192 ACCOMPLISHMENTS than a trotting-horse Avith an amble. You may not see the diflference ; but there is one, just the same, as there is 'twixt tweedledum and tweedledee. If, for saddle, you have to choose between a good singlefoot and a good trot, by all means take the singlefoot, unless you prefer fashion to comfort. Still, the trot is one of the finest of saddle gaits in its place ; it is out of place only when you use it to the exclusion of everything else ; it then becomes a species of treadmill. 5. To say that a saddle-horse must guide by the neck is as absurd as to say that a well-educated man must know some grammar. Still, in these two - handed days, when a man cannot blow his nose, let alone assist his equestrienne, without losing partial control of his horse, the statement must be ventured. The saddle-horse's neck must be suppled so that, so soon as you take up the rein, he will give his head to your hand and keep it there. He must be able to execute the pirouette, i.e. move in a circle in either direction about one hind-foot, which shall not leave the ground. His hind-quarters must be sup- pled so that the use of the spur, or the closing of the legs shall bring his hind-feet under him, to collect his forces ; in other words, he must readily come in hand. As a se- quence to this he must execute the reversed pirouette round one of his fore-feet. He must traverse — move side- wise— at least a dozen steps, without effort. 6. He must pass from an}^ one of his gaits to any other at the slightest indication, and without flurry. He must start into the canter with either shoulder leading, or change lead at will when in motion. 7. He must be able to jump handily and in cold blood any reasonable obstacle, say a fence or wall up to three feet and a half. If he will face four feet at call, he is an able jumper. / cm BONO? 193 8. He must, with good courage and endurance, have perfect manners, and never sulk, get nervous or flurried, alone or in company, or act otherwise than as a horse treated with uniform kindness and firmness should act. His mouth must be velvet, but still capable of feeling your hand, and all his instincts must be keen and lively. With these accomplishments you have a " saddle-horse " sufficiently well trained for any ordinary purpose of pleas- ure ; but you have only laid the foundation for a high- school education. Your steed has merely got the three ^''s — reading, Hting, and rithmetic. To give a horse this knowledge presupposes some skill in the trainer ; properly to ride such a horse equal knowl- edge. Every one who rides habitually has time to learn the art to the above quoted extent ; and a horse so trained need by no means be so delicate that he requires an ex- pert to ride him. With courage, intelligence, and good manners, this education will only make him more tracta- ble and more handy in whatever place you put him. To do all this is by no means beyond the skill of any one who is really fond of horses and horsemanship. To him who rides merely because his doctor has confided to him that he has a liver, or because every one else rides, I would say, buy your article ready-made. But wherein is such a horse the better for road-riding ? asks our chappie with the crop and irreproachable nether garments. No whit, friend, unless education be better than ignorance. If Mother Goose satisfies you, you do not need Homer or Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe — and Heaven forefend that I should underrate Mother Goose ! Mind you, I have not said that a hunter or a polo-pony needs these accomplishments, though he would undenia- bly be the better for some of them. But these horses 13 194 THE HORSE'S ENJOYMENT have a definite work cut out for them ; the saddle-horse is merely a companion along the road. Each and every one of these accomplishments is dis- tinctly useful. A busy walk enables you to rest your horse frequently without either of you being bored or losing ground by lack of speed. The trot enables you to change gait and equally ease yourself and your steed's muscles. To change lead in the canter saves the fore-feet, for a horse which always leads on one foot runs danger of going lame by-and-by. It also saves the houghs. The rack is the easiest of all paces, and is, par excellence, a hot weather gait, when a trot is all but impossible except to a man in training. To shift the fore-quarters quickly means handiness in turning and less danger of tripping a horse up ; and the same applies to the shifting of the hind-quarters. Moreover, without the latter, how can you place your horse where you want him, as to open a gate, or to keep your place in a group of riders ? The utility of the rest goes without saying, and this is but a little of the practi- cal side; while the pleasure of it all is hard to be ex- plained to a man who has not been through it, or to a horse which is not thus trained. For the horse, be it said, is as keen in his enjoyment of it all as the man ; I sometimes think more keen than most men. To whatev^er horse -owner there may be who cannot hunt or play polo or breed, or who has not a long enough purse to own racers, let me prescribe the stud}' of pure saddle -work; he will be rewarded a hundredfold for his experiment. And this especially if he is getting on in years, and wants a quiet rather than a boisterous pleasure. To revert to the text, though we seem to have reached a sort of Fourteenthly : it is not to be wondered at that we Americans have sought our models in the Old Country. It is the English who have taught us nearly all our sports. AMERICANISM 195 Anglomania in its proper sense is as excellent as in its forced sense it is absurd. If to learn from the Briton how to race or hunt or play polo be Anglomania, let us all be inoculated for the disease, and speedily. If to swear by everything English, from togs to manners, just because it is English, be Anglomania, the sooner we are rid of it the better. The word must be advisedly used. In its better sense, we are all Anglomaniacs who are not sick with Anglophobia, a much worse type of the disease. But give Americanism a chance, especially in horseman- ship. We have no cause to be ashamed of what we have in horses, nor of what we can do in the saddle. And a judicious choice in the field and on the road of what is best at home and abroad ought to put us in equestrianism, if not where we stand in vachtinc;:, at least on a lev^el hisfh enough to satisfy the most critical. XXXIII Come with me across the ocean. If thou fearest the sickness of the sea, friend, come with me but in spirit, for old Xeptune hath ordained that the particular part of his domain which is the most frequently crossed, the North Atlantic, shall be the most constantly stormy. It is thus he punishes him who dares his authority by ploughing through his purple .waters. I wonder whether the an- cients sacrificed to the fishes any the less for sacrificing to N^eptune before they went aboard. However this may have been, libations poured out to the grizzly God of the Trident were assuredly less foolish than many nostrums against sea-sickness in our own day and generation. "Well, here we are in England. Mother - country, all hail! Years have I tasted thy bounteous hospitality, hearty thanks have I laid at thy feet ! And as I am about to speak of thy horsemen, I begin by a cordial bow of admiration, for they are truly to be admired, in the good old Latin sense. I will but take the chair, as it were, and begin by in- troducing better speakers. Says my ancient comrade. Colonel Edward L. Anderson — of the fighting Andersons, and once of General Sherman's staff — in that most author- itative of modern series, the Britannica of sports, the Bad- minton Library, to wit : " In breeding horses, in rearing and in caring for them, in racing them and in riding them across country, the Englishman is easily first." To which I say amen. In the same volume {Elding and Polo), one THE INTOLERANT BRITON 197 of the best of horsemen, sportsmen, and critics, known to us all as " Rapier," of the Sporting and Dramatic News^ Alfred E. T. Watson — may his shadow never grow less ! — remarks that "an Englishman's highest ambition, apart from success in sport between the flags, is to ride straight to hounds in the manner which, causing no unnecessary exertion to hnnself or horse, enables horse and man to last the longest without fatigue." " The Englishman has no sort of desire to practise the ' high airs ' of the school. To him it seems an utter waste of time to induce a horse to piaffer, execute the Spanish trot, or perform other feats of school training. If he can make his horse lead off with either leg as he may indicate, and perhaps swing his croup as well as his fore-hand, the animal is looked on as possessing a superfluit}^ of accomplishments." These two statements cover the entire case. It is true that the Englishman is unapproachable in his own prov- ince ; it is also true that he despises the high-school, and that he doesn't know a saddle-horse as we know him in the Southern States. I have interlarded so many observa- tions on the English method in my chat about our own ways, that there is scarce a word left to be said. I can- not overstate my unswerving fealty to the Briton's horse- manship as above construed, any more than I could over- state my affection for his frank and manly, if often brusque and pushing, habit the wide world over. Why should he not, if he chooses so to do, plume himself on owning, if not, as we are said to do, on beating all creation? It is a refreshino;' thino; to see and hear liim assert it. If we fondly imagine we know better, and inwardly chuckle at his unconscious intolerance along the highways and by- ways of life, it does him no harm ; and surely we, too, are chips of the old block. British narrowness has wrought great things — as narrowness has everj^where. Antislavery 198 THE BRITISH CAVALRY SEAT was narrowness, and yet the extremists were the men who roused us to the efforts which cuhninated in freedom to the slave. Too great breadth will not keep the world a-moving. St. Paul makes a mistake in urging content- ment at all seasons — at least, in the way his translators have quoted him. Had he himself been one of your con- tented men, he would scarcely have accomplished what he did. And the Englishman's self-contentment and self- assertiveness are coupled with a fine habit of putting in big licks, hitting straight from the shoulder, in every part of the world. Just what right, for example, he has to be here in Egypt (where I happen to be penning these lines), I fail to see, and yet what a change he has wrought for the better! The poor fellahin to-day know that their land will be irrigated in its due turn, and for the first time since the Sphinx was hewn from its native rock can gauge the tax they will have to pay. So works the Briton everywhere and in most mundane affairs — but this thing militates against just what produces the niceties of equitation. The English army officer rides well, just because he rides like an English gentleman. The British trooper rides no worse, no better, than any other regular cavalryman. Seat is larcjelv an individual habit. I have seen men in the English cavalry, just as I have seen men in our own regiments, ride extreme forked-radish style, sitting bolt up- right on the crotch, while other men in the same troop would have in the saddle a regular cross - country seat, barring the fact that their toes were in the stirrups instead of riding " home." The only difference I have ever been able to perceive between our own and the British cavalry seat is, as be- fore stated, that our men are wont to depress their heels a trifle less, riding in a more natural, less (b-ill- stiffened THE HORSE GUARDS 199 way. The Horse Guards ride with particularly long stir- rups, though part of the appearance of this is due to their superabundance of leg. But, good or bad, tlie Briton has enough to be proud of ; let us leave him alone in his cj:lorv. XXXIY Would that the times still were when one might cross the Channel dry-shod ! Why did the sea ever encroach on that invaluable neck of dry land ? If there is an un- certainty of travel in any part of the commonly trotted universe, it is that nasty bit of water. Nasty is said not to be a nice word, but it literally describes man and the ele- ments on the Channel. Yet if we Americans, easily first in travelling conveniences, should have that water between our two biggest cities (not to mention the two capitals of the world), we would put a ferry there which would make the transit a pleasure in lieu of a dread. The Club train runs from London with its five millions of souls to Paris with half the number once a day, costs about six cents a mile, and is rather a petty affair for the fuss they make over it. From little provincial Boston, with its scant half-million population, you have some twenty trains a day, giving you more speed, more comfort, and vastly more elegance for two and a half cents a mile, and you are not limited to a paltry sixty pounds of impedimenta, or atrociously taxed if your wife happens to have brought along a few extra Saratogas to swell the weight. Our baggage is rarely subjected to delays or impost ; English luggage is not so lucky. It takes thirty -eight hours to run from Paris to Rome, some eleven hundred miles, if my memory serves me ; and you practically have no comfort whatever for the five cents a mile you pay. You run from New York to Chicago, nenrly the same distance, in twenty-two SAUMUR RIDING 201 hours or less, at half the cost, and in what luxury ! How distinctly we lead in travelling, despite the occasional su- perciliousness of the Pullman nigger ! " Where'er I roam, whatever lands I see, My heart, untravelled, fondly turns to thee," and I might add, my body does too, if travelling is to be synonymous with comfort. But let us come to the Frenchman. It used to be said that there were many C'hurch people who would not sub- scribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, but who had an implicit faith in the Forty Thieves ; and it is a sort of fortieth article to every dweller in the bright little, tight little island that Johnny Crapaud cannot ride. But he can. In some respects, such as fine training and school-riding, he is vastly the Briton's superior. And now that he has taken a bad form of the international disease yclept Anglo- mania, and has begun to do some rough-and-tumble riding, he may prove still more of a rival to his neighbor across La Manche. The French military man rides well. At Saumur the equestrian education is good. I have seen a number of Saumur cadets riding over a decentish obstacle. They all showed excellent skill, though no one can judge from drill-ground or manege riding how a man might ride to hounds— if the latter is to be made the ultimate test, as it should not be. For the purpose for which the Saumur training is intended there is a sufficiency of leaping. There are otlier things in cavalry drill, or in the prepara- tion of an officer for staff service, besides jumping obsta- cles, though it is hard to convince a Briton of it. They have recently been taking riding photographs at Saumur, which are published in a series, a la Muybridge, but on a very limited scale. I was shown photographs of a horse in the successive positions of the trot and canter HOW TO DO IT as an nnusnal thing ; and when I said that the ITniversity of Pennsylvania had taken all animals, from men to birds, in motion, and had published a series of plates containing thirty thousand phototypes, I was stared at politely but reproachfully and incredulously. We are given credit for very little abroad. The simplest thing you tell a foreigner runs the risk of being looked at as a gross exaggeration. I have had intelligent people gaze at me as if I had been spinning a monumental yarn, to put it mildly, because, ^^.p-.. I told them that T^ittsburg had for years been lighted and heated and had its factories driven by natural gas, or that petroleum was transported by pipe-lines, over hill and dale, from the oil-fields, several hundred miles, to the ocean. When I was a small boy, the elevator in the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia was already running, and it was " WONDEKFUL BRITONS !" 203 soon followed by elevators all over the country. After a generation or so the English caught on to the idea and began to put in timid little things of the same genus, but by no means of the same species, and called them Lifts. By-and-by the people on the Continent saw the point and put in a few still more timorous dcenseurs : " Etonnants, ces Anglais I Quelle invention ! Yoila qui vaut la peine !" In 1854, if I remember right, George Francis Train put a horse-railroad on the Bayswater Road from the Marble Arch to Kensington Gate. I rode on the first car. The scheme failed, because it was not legally protected, and the cabbies were down on it and could not be prevented from driving at a walk on the track ahead of the cars. Horse-railroads were then as old as the hills in America. Again, after the lapse of half a generation, the English caught on and started what they improperly called trams; and later the simple Continental folk followed suit with their Tranvays. Not a suspicion that we Americans had ever had elevators or horse-railroads ; oh no, it was the original, the wonderful, the veritable English lift and tram — " Donnerwetter, was f lir Kerle, die Engliinder ! — and so forth, and so on. The French civilian is not, as a rule, as good a horseman as the " militaire.*" There are many high -school riders who are masters of the art. But there is no special sport in which to shake the average Frenchman into the saddle, unless it be those which by imitation he has taken from Albion, just as we have done at home; and these can be, or are, pursued but in a few places. As a rule, the French civilian impresses you as rather finicky in his style. When he rides in the Bois de Boulogne there is a lack of freedom in his equitation, which is well characterized by the con- stant use of the bit rather than the bridoon. And what- ever national method he may have had in the days of 204 THE JAM OF JAMNUGGER Baucher, or ought since to have built up on the foundation laid by this great man, seems to have been swallowed up in his craze for matters English. In dress and horse rig and seat he closely follows the Briton, and then forsooth rides all day long on the curb, as the Briton never would do. This incompleteness makes me think of the portrait of the Jam of Jamnugger, which I possess, dressed in all the magnificence of a Hindoo maharajah, except for his feet, which are incased in a pair of three-dollar Douglas shoes ! Please note that this also is not a paid Ad., though it ought to be. In many matters equine the French are as admirable as in their own specialty, the Percheron ; but not so in riding. And yet, as was ob- served long ago, they are horsy enough to call their mothers mares and dub their daughters fillies. The French have done one thing which we must not forget. The first man who show^ed the world that intelli- gent kindness was the real secret of horse breaking and training was the Frenchman Baucher. Up to his day colts had been broken by cruel methods, and were never more than half trained. The tempers of the majorit}' were irretrievably ruined. Baucher taught an entirely new system, and the whole world has benefited by it. Even English breakers, though they scorn his higher edu- cation, unwittingly make use of the devices he intro- duced. It has, however, been reserved for Governor Leland Stan- ford's farm at Palo Alto to perfect the methods of kind- ness. The men on the place are forbidden to sjicak in an angr}'' tone to a colt ; a man who should swear at or strike one would be instantly discharged. From the time the foal is born, he is habituated to tlie presence and the gen- tling of man, and is taught that he receives nothing but kindness and favors at his hands. One rule is enforced: PALO ALTO • 205 when the foal or colt is near his groom or his master, he must never indulge in play, but stand quiet and allow him- self to be petted or handled in any fashion. In the pad- dock he may fool to the top of his bent ; but never in the society of man. As a result the colt does not have to be broken, in our sense of the word ; he is ready to be hitched up and driven when he is old enough to work. The sys- tem is perfection. XXXY What shall be said of the German rider ? That, within certain limits of his own, and these are practically con- fined to cavalry methods, the German rides well, no one can deny. A squadron, or a regiment, or a brigade of cavalry moves in an irreproachable manner; the troops drill like automata ; their conduct in the field is worthy of their history ; but when you see the men by themselves they do not always impress you as easy at their work. It may safely be assumed that the Germans know what they are about ; and that they can organize and drill cavalry has been sufficiently demonstrated. Our comment can extend no further than the individual. When, as a boy, I was in Prussia, there was nothing more revolting to the sense of propriety of the average citizen than matters English ; now there is a strong pro- clivity to the international disease. On a number of oc- casions in my youth I visited school friends at their homes in the country, and there found a deal of excellent riding. In those days German w^as the home language, but French was universally employed in social intercourse, and the mother-tongue was interlarded with Gallic phrases. We would be comfortably talking German, perhaps even in- dulging in the old Berlin patois, which included in its vocabulary the " Ne !" or the soft pronunciation of " g," which gave rise to the phrase " Ecne jute jebratene Jans ist eene jute Jabe Jottes," when a runaway ring at the bell would startle all of us out of, or rather into, our pro- GERMAN LEAPING 207 priety, and we would begin to chatter French as glibly as, if not with the brogue of, denizens of Paris — for it might be company. What in those Gallo-Teutonic days they used to call the Parforce Jagd was stag or boar hunting in the saddle, during which you were compelled to ride over all kinds of country, sometimes stiff enough. This was not done at racing pace, nor were the obstacles as bad as the ox-fences in the Midland counties ; but still it Avas fairish sport, and the game was better worth having than Reynard's brush or pads, for the pack is wont to de- vour Reynard, while we used to eat the stag or boar (when we got him) at the hunt-dinner in the evening, or a day or two later when he had got more tender. The run was not infrequently through heavy timber, where there were many fallen trees to clear, and a deal of thicket to get through ; and I have seen excellent horsemanship in such a hunt. Horsemanship is relative. Because Buffalo Bill or Sotnik Dmitri Peshkof could not keep in the same field with the hounds over a difficult country is no proof that either falls short of being one of the best of horsemen. I think the German military rider is a trifle stiff ; and I do not like the way the soldier is taught his leaping ex- ercises. It is rather absurd to make so much account of jumping; but the world is agog on the subject, and he that leapeth a six-foot fence is greater than he that taketh a city. No horse in cold blood leaps willingly with any- thing but an easy bit ; and yet the German soldier is taught to use his curb exclusively. The obstacle the en- listed man leaps at squad-drill is a small affair, over which the horse could almost step if he tried hard, and of course the commonest troop horse clears it easily. But I have never, seen a German soldier sit down on his horse at even such a leap ; he does not curl his sitting-bones under him, as the phrase runs, but relies on the stirrups and goes out 208 THE NEGRO RIDER of his saddle at a two-foot hurdle. Sometimes a German soldier riding at a hurdle is the very type of how not to do it. There is no man who sits down on his horse more ad- mirably than the negro. He seems to settle into his seat in much the same limber way he dances a break-down. While his muscles are all in readiness to grip his horse or saddle, his joints are loose and he gets nearer to his mount than almost any man I know. While he may not always be discreet in his management of a horse, he is otherwise a capital example for the ramrod soldier to imitate ; and when a darky is a good horseman he is apt to be ahead of his white competitor. He and the horse invariably under- stand each other. I have had negro grooms who would keep the paces of my saddle-horses pure and distinct, and whom in my absence I would trust to ride them month in, month out, when I would not let one of my white grooms — certainly no English groom I ever knew — get astride one, even to ride him to the blacksmith. What I have said above is not all there is to German leaping. The cavalry often goes at an obstacle by troops ; and horses, even on the curb, will leap vastly freer in company than singly. So far as manoeuvres go one can scarcely criticise the Germans, and their squadron -drill includes riding over a wall and ditch. The men rarely lose than seats, and this leaves little to be said. It is the individual soldier who does not at all times impress us so favorably. I am not speaking of the officers ; as a class they ride well, and I have known many splendid horsemen among them. The German civilian rides d la militaire ; every man has served his time. There is a certain set fashion throughout the German Empire in every phase of life. Things are conducted within hues which forbid their ex- IHE GERMAN TYPE 209 paiision into types. In America, in the Orient, you may find numberless types, the pattern of each of which is its. own individuality ; but ever present organization, in civil and military matters alike, all through the German struct- ure, forbids novelty. All things are cast in one mould ; and there may be said to be but one type of horseman. HOW NOT TO DO IT XXXYI I FEAR we may not be permitted to wander together all over Europe. We must ride to orders, and seek climes more full of oddities in horsemanship. There is not much difference, after all, between any of the riders of the great military powers, barring Kussia. As in Germany, they all pattern on the same model, and produce, Avith :some questions of degree, about the same horsemen. If Austria could claim that her people were fit followers of their gallant Empress, who is noted as one of the best riders who ever led the field over Warwickshire, they would be distinctly at the top of all the horsemen of Eu- rope ; but Her Majesty is a clear exception to every rule of royalty. She is peerless in the side-saddle. The Austro- Hungarians, m the recent Berlin -Vienna ride, were ready victors, and received from the German Emperor the com- pliment of being called the best cavalry in Europe — a tru- ism partly due to their pattern being at hand in the admi- rable light horse of their eastern dominions, which they have cleverly imitated. The Russians have, in a similar manner, patterned to a certain extent on the Cossack ; but of him we shall treat when we come to the Oriental, whose ways he possesses more than those of the European. The Italians present nothing peculiar in their equitation. They are cast in the same military mould as the rest of nations, though their method is to-day somewhat marred by the English saddle and an imperfect imitation of the English seat; and these are, I deem it, inapplicable to cav- OURS VS. FOREIGN CAVALRY 211 airy riding of the best order — a point on which I have elsewhere dilated. With reference to army officers in Europe, I must say that I have always found among them not only admirable riders, but a strong spirit of appreciation of what is best in horsemanship as well. It may be assumed as an axiom that what they know and what they do is best fitted to what their respective military duties may be. To say that our own army officers could readily learn to do their work, and that they would naturally have much more to learn in order to succeed on our peculiar terrain and under our difficult conditions, wdiile it may be praise to the adaptiveness of our men, is by no means a discredit to those whose duties savor as much of the barracks and drill-ground as the duties of our array do of what is tech- nically known as partisan warfare. XXXYII "Whoso, when he reaches the home of the Moor or the Bedouin, or stands where, scorning to live under a roof, the Arab of the desert pitches his ciimers-hair tent and lazes away a profitless existence, eating his bread in the sweat, not of his own brow, but of that of his slaving wives and daugliters ; where the date-palm and the oHve- tree — or at need the Barbary fig — stand between the list- less son of the prophet and annual starvation ; where inan is literally the dust of the field, and mixes with his native sod as constantly during life as after death ; where woman has no soul, and is but a crude promise of the houri of the hoped-for paradise ; wliere every instinct points to indo- lence, and where man has not bettered his condition one jot for fifty generations ; whoso, because he is among Arabs, fondly imagines that he will find himself among better horses than surround him at home, is doomed to grievous disappointment. Good horse-flesh is as rare on the Arabian desert as it is in England or America. There are more high-grade horses in Kentucky to-day per thou- sand of population than the first home of the ancestor of all blooded stock has ever boasted. A faultless steed is a pearl of great price ; it is difficult to be found ; and like the scriptural jewel, a nuin must often sell all that he hath to buy it. '•Where are the Arabian horses?" you ask, on reaching Morocco or Algeria. " Those are Arabians, pure blood," comes the answer, with a gesture towards some diniiimtive ORIGIN OF GOOD HORSES 213 equine specimens, for all the world like broncos. " But the proud, gentle, high-spirited, well-mannered, intelligent, beautiful Arabians, of which we have from youth up heard — which we have come, lo ! these many thousand weary miles to worship?" "Ah, you must go to the desert for those !" You accordingly journey to the edge of the desert, perhaps Biskra way, or perchance over liill and dale of never-ending golden sands to the first oasis out beyond the limits where white men congregate ; but, alas ! it is always a sheik or a caliph farther on, at the next oasis, or the next, who has the perfect animal your eye longs to feast upon. Or else, as ill-luck will have it, he has just started with his pet, his choicest mare, the apple of his eye, on a visit to the second cousin of his grandmother, a hundred leagues away. I have, I believe, just missed the most peerless steed of the Orient some forty times save one. The reason is not far to seek. Good horses come solely from selection and breeding. But, you will object, there was no breeding to produce the bronco, of whose wonder- ful qualities 3'ou have heretofore told us. On the con- trary, there was natural selection of the very best. Start- ing with pure blood — i.e., the Moorish horses carried bv the Spaniards to America, and there, fugitive or abandoned, the survival of those fittest to flee from wolves or to search good pasture and water over immense stretches of prairie land, bred the hardiest of stock. Man, with the utmost care and skill, could in a certain sense scarcely have done better by the race in all except beauty. On the other hand, starting from the same stock, let man overwork and underfeed the horse and neglect his breedino:, and in a few generations the noblest race will degenerate. It is just this which has taken place in almost all the countries which ought to possess the very highest grade of horse- ]4* 214 KINDS OF ARABS fiesb. We are wont to associate an Arab witb tbe idea of love for and gentle treatment of bis steed ; on tbe con- trarv, it is less tban one in a bundred Arabs wbo treats bis horse witb intelligence or witb kindness, and tberefore it is less tban one in a bundred wbicb becomes anything but a commonplace beast of burden. Tbere are two kinds of Arab tribes : first, those dwelling in tbe cities, subsisting by the lower trades and living from band to mouth in crowded filth, and those dwelling in the lesser communities, such as small towns and villages, earning a precarious livelihood by a crude sort of agricult- ure or by raising dates or olives, and living in mud-walled huts roofed witb thatch, sod, or tile ; second, tbe tent- dwellers, who rove from place to place and are purely a pastoral people, subsisting on the yield of their flocks and herds and the breeding and sale of tbe camel, horse, and ass. Among the first, when they have any, as is rare enough, the horse has become a sumpter animal, a means of trans- portation or an item in husbandry, and has, as a matter of course, fallen from bis high estate. Among tbe latter be has kept some of bis better qualities ; among some of tbe wealthy he has retained all his attributes. It goes without saying that in the cities it is tbe rich Avho own the finest stock; on the desert this is not always true. Unless ground into tbe very dust by poverty, many a man wbo owns no other earthly possessions may have as fine a mare as tbe noblest sheik ; and he will starve bis own flesh and blood to keep her sleek and hearty. In fact, it is she whose foal will annually fill tbe empty exchequer. An Arab, meaning a tent-dweller, for in an equine sense tbe town-dweller is no Arab, loves first and above all bis mare. No need to recite the oft-sung affection be will lavish upon her, tbe care he will take of bis glossy favor- ite, for whose preservation be will gladly pinch bis own LOVES OF THE ARABS 215 belly, l^ext to his steed he loves his fire-arm. This, po- etically speaking, ought to be a six-foot, gold and jade in- laid, muzzle-loading horror of a matchlock, which would kick any man but an Arab flat on his back at every shot ; but actually, in Algeria and Tunis, when he lives near a city and is allowed by the French authorities to own one at all, it is rather more apt to be a modern English breach- loader of approved pattern, with plenty of ammunition handy. You must fly from the busy haunts of men in these days of ours to find the ancient matchlock. Next to his fire-arm the Arab loves his oldest son, in w^iom he really harbors a worthy pride. Last comes his wife — or one of his wives. If he is a man by nature faithful, his first wife may always remain his favorite ; if inconstant, it will be his last. Daughters do not even count; I mean the Arab scarcely takes the trouble to count them, unless in so far as they can minister to his comfort, dietetic or otherwise. Until some neighbor comes along and proposes to marry, in other words to make a still* worse slave of one of them, she is only a chattel, a soulless thing. And yet she is said to be a pretty, amiable, helpful being ; said to be, for no one by any hap casts his eye on one worth seeing. I have made every eff'ort, within and without the bounds of Arab propriety, I might saj^ safety, to investi- gate the Arabian maiden — but to no avail. This disre- gard of women, be it said to their honor, does not always apply to the w^ilder, but more intelligent, independent, and manly Bedouin of the S^anan and Arabian deserts. But of this wdien w^e get so far upon our travels. Let me premise, in this screed anent the horses on the south and east of the Mediterranean basin, that it is not my purpose to descant solely upon the choice steeds Avhich may be classed as Arabians. This is the burden of the song of nearly all who tell us of the horse of the Orient. 216 HIGH-TYPE HORSES The Anazeli mares are claimed by the best judges to be the only royal stock of the eldest branch ; but this infor- mation does one no good ; for by no chance whatsoever does a Frank ever come within a distance of winning such a prize. In America, a long purse will buy a '' Sunol" or an " Arion,'' a " St. Julien " or a " Nancy Hanks ;" but his Imperial Majesty the Sultan himself has neither money nor wit nor power to purchase or take one of the best or even one of the second best Anazeh mares. They are, so far as we are concerned, out of the race. I purpose to tell you of the average Arabian, the horse that a Frank may buy ; one who is of as good lineage as the animal a well-to-do citizen rides in our part of the world. Few of us throw our legs across a pure descendant of " Lexington," or even of " Justin Morgan," and it seems to me that there is more interest in the steed of every day than in the mystery sur- rounding the horse one sses as rarely as we see a Derby winner ; a horse we must pursue as one does the ignis fatuus, and who is equally evanescent. The true Arab's undoubted love for his steed has kept up, in some few places over the entire area where the Ara- bian horse flourishes, a more or less pure strain of the wonderful old stock. The wealthy or princely have no doubt improved on the original, but not in any great measure ; certainly not by any means as we Anglo-Saxons have done. The heritage of the Arabian or the Barb — there is only a difference in nomenclatui'e and habitat be- tween them ; they are otherwise, barring some equine points, very nearly the same animal — is the power of transmitting his qualities in undiminished measure to his offs])ring, and the power of extraordinary endurance at speed. Wiiat tiie latter' means I can only explain ilhistra- tively. It is not distance that kills, but speed. Any de- cent horse can go tliirty mile.-; a day witii a reasonable IIEKITAGE OF ARABIAN 217 load over good roads at a walk, and keep on doing it day in day out for years, fat and hearty No horse that was ever foaled could run or trot, at the top of his speed (say a 1.42 or a 2.15 gait), three one-mile dashes every day for a season without breaking down. In other words, at speed a horse cannot do one-tenth of the distance he can at a slow gait. It is only the occasional coarse-bred horse who has speed ; and when one has it, still he cannot stay at speed. But this is just what the old desert blood ena- bles a horse to do ; and it is this wonderful quaUty whicli, through the English thorough-bred, we have got at home in our runners and trotters and saddle-beasts, and by a principle of natural selection in the bronco. And this same quality we Occidentals, by more intelligent and careful breeding and trainino^ and racing than the horse has ever undergone elsewhere, may fairly claim to have improved. XXXYIII Where this wonderful creature, the Arabian horse, originally came from will never be known. It seems to have been shown by geologists that remains of the horse are found in older strata, or associated with more ancient races of men, in Europe than in any part of Asia. Whether this proves that the horse had his origin in Europe, or merely that research has been pushed further on Euro- pean soil than it has been in Asia, it is not within our province to inquire. So far as concerns good equine stock — ^.€., the horses impregnated more or less by thorough blood — we need go no further back than what we know of them in the Syrian or Arabian desert ; the horses of the Libyan desert came from these ; the Spanish horses came from the Libyan desert, and our broncos came from the Spanish ; while the English thorough-bred has descended from sires of either the one or the other, imported into England under the Stuarts. Whatever the history of the horse from a geological stand-point, it is not worth while to search beyond what we can glean from the early history of the steed of the Bedouin. In some manner the Ara- bian came of a common native race of horses which man had intelligence and patience enough to seek to improve by breeding them in a congenial climate for many genera- tions ; or rather he came of a common strain which first got improved because the man of the desert found his profit and his safety in the superior speed and endurance of his steeds, and naturally bred from these. This is the summary of all we know. ORIGIN OF BARBS 219 In what is modern Algeria, the Mauretania of the Ro- mans, where Carthage was a great city long before dis- dainful Remus hopped over Romulus's wall, there is little doubt that the nimble, intelligent runt of a steppes pony, which furnished the mounts for the Numidian cavalry that later all but destroyed Rome in the Second Punic War, which had no bridle but was guided by a stick or by the legs and voice, and whose endurance knew no bounds, was the ancestor of the native horse of to-day. The same thing applies to Morocco. There were other similar breeds in other parts of the East, some of which had been earlier perfected ; but the horse of the Algerian country no doubt descended from the Numidian pony as he is known in his- tory. The steppes horse, of whatever country, is generally a stayer and a good progenitor. All others get weeded out from the herds by wild animals or by scant forage. Just as the modern thorough -bred comes of the native British mares impregnated by Barb or Arabian sires, so with the Numidian pony. Upon this animal an impress must have been made from time to time by importations of markedly good individuals from farther east, for the horse, like civilization, has uniformly travelled westward, until now, the Californian claims, it has reached its hioh- est development on the Pacific slope ; but when the French conquered Algeria in 1830 they found the countrj' horse on a decidedly low level. That the Barb had theretofore been a noble creature is sufficiently shown by the history of the Moors in Spain ; but neglect had sapped his quality. There was not much done by the French for some time to improve the stock, but later the best grade of stallions were bought by the Government for public use ; a num- ber of fine ones were purchased from the trans -Jordan Bedouins of Syria; breeding for the army was carefully attended to, and now the cavalry of the entire Nineteenth 220 ALGERIAN HORSE Corps d'Armee is mounted on what may be called Arabian horses, while numbers go to France. The corps has about fifteen thousand such animals. Only stallions are used. Mares out on the desert are kept for breeding ; within the limits of civilization the few there are have been put to work in the fields. One almost never sees a gelding. The Algerian horse may in every sense be highly com- mended. He is docile from inherited kind treatment, is readily broken, and is, as a rule, without tricks. He has the kind eye and gentle manner of the Barb, a small but not very bony head, a short, light, but round barrel and perfect legs and feet. He is often leggy, but has good lung-power. He has not quite enough body to suit my ideas. That roundness which we all like behind the girths, and which we consider essential to good qualities of endurance, does not often exist. An old-fashioned horseman would say that, to all appearances, he did not carry his feed well. Perhaps he is not fed as much hay as our stock has to have for mere warmth. He is neat-turned and averages good- looking, but he does not carry an extra -high head, and rarely carries a decent tail. They hog his mane not in- frequently, a habit which is generally bred of Anglomania among the French, though it is not unknown even among the Bedouins of the desert. The drawing-book or lady\s- album Arabian one may go many a Sabbath-day's journey to find — and then fail to find him. There tlo exist Ara- bians with the wonderful head, speaking eye, nervous ear, teacup muzzle, delicate throttle, powerful shoulder, wrought steel legs, high croup, and tail a poem ; but they are very much like black pearls ; we know that there exist such jewels, we occasionally see one in Tiffany's or on the neck of some decolletee lady, but they arc beyond our reach. Two Arabians were sent over to General Grant as a present. They were good specimens, but not the very FRENCH ALGERIAN CAVALUYMAX ON BARB SHOW HORSES 223 best of their kind, according to the Anazeh standard. Some French officers in Algeria have picked up fine Ara- bians from sheiks in the desert, for which they have paid, I was told, from two thousand francs and upwards — a cheap enough price in an}^ event, for, like trotters in the 2.20 class, the number of good ones is extremely limited. You or I would have to pay thrice the sum. One thing you will be very sure to find in every part of the world, and that is that work and show do not go to- gether — your every-day utility-horse does not carry about his patent of nobility with him, however high-bred he may be. He proves his lineage by what he can do, not by his simple looks. If you want to have a show horse you must keep him for show. You will find him standing in every part of the country, from Palo Alto to Bangor, in all of our Eastern racing-stables, in every great breeding- establishment at home or abroad. He bears his pedigree in his fervid eye, his grand arched crest, his perfect form, his noble bearing, his high switching tail, and his bold, free step. He points to the performances of his get to prove what he himself might accomplish, and often to a past record as fine as theirs. The show horse is not the worker, nor is he to be easily found, even in Arabia. And I doubt whether the entire area of the Libyan and Syrian deserts boasts as splendid a specimen of horse-flesh as — say old " Longfellow " or " Electioneer." XXXIX The Algerian cavalry horse is a very attractive fellow, lie stands from fourteen and a half to fifteen and a half hands, not often higher ; weighs, as I gauge him, eight to nine hundred pounds — though they claim that he actually weighs one-fifth less than this — and is able to carry his man with sixty pounds of baggage, say two hundred and ten to twenty pounds in all, a strong day's journey and re- peat. I have been unable to find good proof of many won- derful performances, such as our cavalry on the plains with American horses, or cowboys on broncos often enough exhibit ; but there is not the same call for exceptional performances in Algeria; and if one were to believe the Arab when he is boasting of his pet's ability to go, one would set the average Arabian down as equal to a trifle more than a Baldwin locomotive. Great tests of distance and speed have to be called out by trying circumstances ; they are rarely needed among a people to whom time is absolutely nothing. More can be told about camels. There is one desert postal route that I heard of in Algeria, but that, though I have no reason to doubt its accuracy, I cannot vouch for, which a camel covers between sunup and sundown, one hundred and seventy-five kilometres or one hundred and eight miles, and back again next day, month in month out, carrying not exceeding two hundred and fifty pounds, or half its full load. I have found but one record of what I call great work l)y horses. About eighty miles a day, act- CAVALRY LEAPING DRILL IN ALGERIA ually measured, is quoted as very great going — to pay no heed to manifest exaggerations. This distance is in truth excellent, but far from great ; it has been more than dou- bled up on at home. One cannot, as a rule, measure the ground covered by the horse on the desert, for lack of statistics or of any sort of reliable testimony. It may be assumed, I suppose, that every one is permit- ted to prevaricate (is that the proper word?) when nar- rating successful tramps after fish ; but it is a curious fact that the larger the game the smaller the prevarication is apt to be. Horse talk is wont to be interlarded with occasional suspicious statements, or at least with state- ments which will bear a bit of checking off. The Arab is no exception to the rule ; he is quite untrustworthy when telling of his steed's performances. There is only one thing in which he is uniformly truthful, and that is pedi- gree. This is because he cannot hide it ; it is a matter of public notoriety in his tribe, and though he may cheat a stranger, it is futile for him to seek to impose on an Arab. In this pedigree matter he is forced to be more reliable 15 226 DISTANCE RIDING than our own liorse-dealers. The manufacture of pedi- grees, when they cannot be traced in the stud-book, is an art much in vogue. In most American horse- markets there is a steady manufacture of pedigrees going on ; and the practice thrives because a man Avho is cheated is wont to hide tlie fact, of which he is heartily ashamed, rather than seek legal redress and get laughed at for his pains. This unwillingness to perform one's duty to the public is a distinct American failing. A very well-vouched-for performance of which I have heard in the Orient is the one already given, viz.: fifteen hundred kilometres, say nine hundred and fifty miles, on one horse in forty-five (\iiys, of which twenty-eiglit daj^s' actual travelling — or thirty- three miles a day. This is a creditable ride, to be sure, but far from a noteworthy one. And the feat was performed, not by an Arabian, but by a Kurd horse, bred on a Persian dam by an Arabian sire. This was a single rider with a small escort. Many of our cavalry regiments have discounted this speed for long dis- tances, and groups of from six to twenty have beaten it out of sight. A very excellent performance by Arabians has recently been given me by Colonel Colvile of the British Army, who has permitted me to quote him. " A party of Towasi Arabs, mounted on Eg3^ptian cavalry horses and accom- panied by two hundred and fifty baggage camels carrying water and supplies, left Assiut, on the Nile, at 6 p.m. on June 28, 1884, under command of Lieut.-Col. Colvile, Grenadier Guards, and Lieut. Stuart Worthy, Sixtieth Kifles, and arrived at Khargeli, in the Great Gasis, at 4 P.M. on June 80th, a distance of one hundred and twenty miles, in forty-six hours. One long halt was made from 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. on June 2!»th ; and the horses being allowed to go theii' own pace, ri'e(|uent siiort halts were ARABIAN IMPRESS 227 made to allow the camels to catch them up. l^o water was obtainable on the way, and the horses were only watered once — i.e.^ during the long halt on the 29th. After fourteen hours' rest at Khargeh, the party pro- ceeded to Beris, distant sixty miles, which they reached at 2 P.M. on the 2d of July. ]S'o horses were lost. Here four hundred men and all the horses were left, and af ter- Avards made their way to the Nile at Esneh, distant about one hundred and twenty miles. I am not in possession of any details of the march, but as the party was unaccom- panied by camels and no water is obtainable on the way, it was probably more rapid than that from the Mle to Khargeh.''' This march, especially in view of the want of water, is of great interest. It ranks well with some of our own cavalry marches, but does not quite approach the best. The Arabian's gait is usually pure ; 3^ou meet many trappy goers who have what one is apt to call a peculiarly Arabian style of picking up their feet, neat and rapid, but not too high, and very attractive. I have come across more shying Arabians than I expected, no more, perhaps, than there are with us; but a horse which is so docile ought not to shy at all. You see many stylish ones when they go out fresh or are feeling particularly^ well ; but I have never met one who showed vice or stubborn temper. There are some, but they are few; the Arabian seems easy to manage and easy to sit when putting on airs. Taken as a race, his manners are irreproachable. One finds in Algiers quite a number of Percherons at draught ; occasionally a mixture between Percheron and Arab. Now and then a cob, stranded by some swell from London or Paris, disconsolately seeks his kind on the streets of this delightful city. A few ponies, and from time to time a fine English -hunter type of imported 228 LIKE A "MORGAN" horse for a heavy-weight officer or a winter resident, may be observed. There are many heavy French officers. The Frenchman has a habit of putting on fat which is quite noticeable, and, though small, he needs a weight- carrier. There are some imported carriage pairs. But as a rule, whether under saddle, or in the cabs, or drawing wagons, or harnessed to pleasure carriages, every city horse bears some mark of the fine old blood. Either the face or the throttle, or the clean leg and mule hoof, or the flea-bitten gray — a distinctive Arabian color — will tell the stor3\ The impress is as strong as it is beautiful, and will always remain. The Morocco and Algeria type of horse is rounder than the type east of the Libyan desert •, he impresses you as having a bigger barrel. Except for a few points which are more distinguished, more blood -like in appearance than our own native strains, and for the fact that he stands with a bit more daylight under him as a rule, the Barb is not unlike what we call a "Morgan.'' But he lacks the enormous girth of the latter, and for his inches will not weigh more than three-quarters as much. Nor do I tliink he can boast any more grit and capacity to do a dis- tance and repeat ; while in speed, at any gait, I should put him on a distinctly lower scale than the descendants of old " Justin." He cannot run a heat race any better, and he can rarely trot a four-minute gait. Wlien it comes to traction, for which tlie " Morgans " were always re- markable animals, the Arabian is simply nowhere. XL Three of the regiments of light cavalry in the French army in Algeria are recruited solely from the Arab popu- lation. The men are called Spahis, and are said to be ex- cellent in their place, amenable to discipline, and apt to prove effective within their limits when called upon. The Berbers, or aborigines, who were in the land prior to the Arab conquest, do not appear as a distinct type m the army. They have been ground down by many genera- tions of poverty, and seem to have lost the notable old Punic trick of fighting. As a military material they are inferior. Most Arabs — all the pastoral or nomad Arabs,, in fact — are stanch French haters. They are held down with the strong hand alone. Only the exceptional Arab, who has given in his submission and is deemed quite trustworthy, is ever allowed to have powder and lead in his possession. All others are deprived of fire-arms and ammunition of every nature. But an Arab who has once accepted the situation, as does the Spahi who enlists, may be trusted, they say, implicitly. The Spahi retains his national dress, furbished up to make him feel proud. He rides in a saddle which is all but as bad as the one the Indian used to make with straight up and down pommel and cantle, and has by no means the latter's raison cVetre. The tree and bearings are long. The pommel is coarsely finished, and rises with scarcely a slope to about the waistband when the man sits down in his seat. The cantle rises almost perpendicu- 230 THE SPAHI larly, and is t\YO inches higher than the pommel, really above the small of the back. Saddle-cloths are used by the Spain ad Jihituin, and woven girths and leathern fit- tings finish this singular saddle. The stirrup-leather hangs from the middle of the tree, and the foot is thrust way into a huge metal stirrup with a foot-piece square and big as a platter. A breast-strap holds the saddle in place for lack of ribs to keep it where it belongs, and the horse is bitted with a gag hung in a peculiar bridle with large square blinders. The Spain's sword rides under his left leg, like the Mexican swell's ; his carbine he carries in his hand or slings from the shoulder or saddle ; he has revolvers in his holsters, and all his weapons are of the best make and pattern. He is quite a stunning fellow this same Spahi, with his turbaned head and flowing red, white-lined burnoose, his light-blue baggy leg-gear, dark-blue jacket, and generally dramatic manner. That he feels his own importance is manifest. His face is bronzed, his eye flashing, and his manner quick and decisive. He is deferential to his superiors, haughty to all he considers beneath him. From a glance at his saddle one may readily see how it is that he can stand so high in his stirrups as he sometimes does when he gallops past you. He mounts as we do, though one would scarcely imagine that he could get his foot up to his short-hung stirrup, or throw his leg across his ex- traordinary peaked cantle; but he mounts indifferently from either side. The fact that his tall-appearing horse averages barelv fourteen-two accounts for his mounting so easily. The Arabian is very deceptive in looks. One feels tempted when you know him to refer to him as a pony — a term, indeed, commonly employed in Egypt — though at a distance he looks tall. The Spahi's seat is peculiar. It is, from the side view, ARAB SADDLES 233 much like the type of the aboriginal Indian of our plains. When he sits in the saddle he is apt to lean forward ; from hip down to knee the leg is almost perpendicular ; and from knee down it is thrust back at what we civilized folk deem a most unhorsemanlike angle. He hates spurs be- cause they prevent his drubbing his horse's flanks with his heels, as well as clutching on by them. Still, after a cer- tain period of association with the French, fashion will sometimes claim him for her own ; he will put on spurs and try to keep his heels where they belong. But he is then no longer Spahi d la nature. He is very expert in the saddle, both in the way of tricks and drill. His Ara- bian may look sleepy while he stands, but he will wake up to astonishing activity so soon as mounted. He quickly catches his riders mood, and can be either steady or gay as you may ask. Most Arab saddles have such an abnormal breadth be- tween the knees that they oblige you most uncomfortably to spread your legs. This does not peculiarly apply to the Spahi's saddle, which has been cut, on a sort of a military plan, to the Arab pattern. But if you want to try the way Orientals usually sit in the saddle, get an extra wide cane-seat chair, sit astride it facing the back, and then put your heels up on the side rounds. Don't lean on the chair- back ; imagine a cantle behind you about two inches above the buttons on the back of your coat, and you have it ex- actly. If you propose to ride this way, make up your mind to the acme of discomfort until you are used to it. Your feet wiU go to sleep, and your hips will get tired enougli to make you howl before you have covered ten miles. Even an old horseman who is used to an English or to our military saddle must undergo the same trial. We should call it an impossible seat for all-day riding ; but the Ori- ental habit of sitting cross-legged, or on a squat, gets the 234 ARAB BITS muscles of the legs and hips used to the confined position, and the Arab will stay in the saddle all but as long as the cowboy or one of Uncle Sam's soldiers. All Arabs ride Avith a severe gag-bit, just as all bronco riders are wont to do. The bit of the country is like one style of Mexican bit — to wit, a ring in the horse's mouth held in place by the cheek-straps, and with a single branch projecting down from the back of it ; and it is to this that the reins are attached. Of course the horse guides by the neck, as all but hyper-English horses do, and as all horses should. The rein is held slack, but the least tightening of it on the severe gag-bit compels the horse to jerk up his head. The nice use of the curb as taught by the school is quite unknown. Each nation, has its own peculiar style. The Englishman and his imitators like to ride a gentle, easy- mouthed horse on a snaffle-bit, and to let him carry his head in a natural way, without seeking by suppling to im- prove on what nature has done for him. This method acts well enough with the average good-mannered horse. With any other he must resort to a harsh bit, and the horse will take hold of it and worry himself while annoy- ing his rider, because he has been taught no l)etter. The school-taught horse is an abomination to the Briton ; but not so to him who knows his ways. lie has a well-trained mouth, and a neck whose muscles bend without effort ; he brings his head in to either curb or snaffle with that de- lightful give and take of the rein which is the height of comfort to man and beast, and which is indicative of an ability in each to understand the other that exists in no other method. The cowboy et id genus omne, and the Arab, use a severe bit that hurts the horse's mouth when- ever the rein is in any degree tightened ; it throws up his head with an uneasy motion which appears to interrupt communication between hand and mouth. And yet the REMOUNT BARB FOR ALGERIAN CAVALRY ARABIAN NECKS 237 proof of the pudding is in the eating ; these natural riders care little for the refinements of horsemanship, despite which both cowboy and Spahi are, each in his way, inimitable. But this nervous dread of the bit distresses me. I have a photograph of a line of Spahis coming to a sharp " Halt !" and every single horse in the line has his nose in the air. A line of school-taught horses would, on the con- trary, probably show not one whose head had not been brought in quietly to the bit; still they would have stopped just as short, and vastly more comfortably to man and beast. In the one case the horse has no dread of the bit, and the neck is supple ; in the other he fears it, and his neck is generally stiff. Artists have a trick of painting Arabians with the neck finely arched, but this is just what the gag-bit prevents. It is the rarest thing to see an Arabian carry what schoolmen call a good head. His nose is uniformly in the air when his head is up ; only when fretting on the bit does he arch his neck, and then he gets his head way down. That nature has given him a peculiarly fine neck is true ; the lines of the crest and throttle are exquisite ; that he almost never arches it is equally so. The three-year-old illustrated brings his head in because he is being broken with a bit and bridoon. It is not uncommon to see the Arabian, properly bitted by a European owner, carry a perfect head. He could not be made on a better model ; but the Arab's method does not utilize what nature has given him. It does not seem to me that the method of the cowboy or that of the Arab makes a good mouth. jSTeither bronco nor Arabian, except under abnormal conditions, ever pulls ; he never even tightens the rein. This is no doubt better than the common run of English-broken horses on a snaffle, who will take hold of you, and bore and bore 238 ONE-REIN DRIVING until your arms ache ; but, on the othei- hand, it is far from being- the dehghtf ul feel of the school method, where there is a line and delicate but constant appreciation by the man of the horse's mouth, and by the horse of his mas- ter's mood and wishes. It is certain that no school airs could be taught with a bit of which the horse is as shy as he is of the cowboy's and the Arab's ; and I have noticed tliat in t\\Q fantaslyas — of which anon — the Arab is wont to make his bit less severe, if it is of the kind he can alter, or else to use an easier one. ISTor could school airs be taught to a horse capable of boring on your hand. While speaking of guiding by the neck, I will mention a very queer way the Arabs have of driving with a single rope, one almost as peculiar as our own way of driving an army mule-team. The horse or mule so driven wears only a rope-halter, from which the rein-rope passes back to the cart on the nigh side of the neck. He has a very high, round saddle to bear the cart-shafts. If the driver desires to turn to the left, he simply pulls the rope. If to the right, he tosses the rope over to the off side of the saddle and then pulls. This pull bears the rope against the nigh side of the horse's neck, and thus turns him to the right. In other Avords, the horse is taught to guide one way by the neck and the other by the rein. This is common enough under saddle, but the method of driving seems original. In our old Civil War times the method of teaching nudes to turn to right or left was wont to be more speedily effi- cacious than reasonable. The nigh mule of the pair of leaders had a single I'ein buckled in the nigh ring of the bit. The off mule had a bar fi-om the front of th(5 nigh nude's collar to his own bit, so that he must turn, nilly Avilly, with his mate. To turn the pair to the left the rein was steadily jiulled ; the near mule had his head brought SPAHI KACKIJS'G ALONG THE ROAD TRAINING MULES 241 round to the left by the pull ; he was apt to follow his nose ; the off mule was pulled over in the same direction by the bar, and presto ! the trick was done. The mule soon caught on to this thing. But to turn to the right was quite a different matter. The only other thing the driver could do with the rein was to jerk it ; but this con- veyed no special idea to the mule — he must be taught the jerk as an arbitrary symbol. So, when drilling the mule to go over to the right, tlie driver had with him an assist- ant with a stick, who walked along close to the nigh mule's head. When the driver pulled the rein, he did nothing ; when he jerked it, the assistant gave the mule a lusty whack on the near side of the head. The mule very naturall}^ sought refuge away from the blow, turned his mate with him, and presto ! that trick, too, was done. The mule lacks not intelligence, and he very speedily learned that a jerked rein was very apt to be followed by a blow on the near side of the head, and made haste to get away from it. The plan was crude but effective. The same method hi petto has for generations been a favorite with the school-master, who has thumped the al- phabet into his pupils' heads with his knuckles. How much happier is the child of to-day with his Reading Without Tears, than the child of sixty years ago, when the vowels were not recited a-e-i-o-u, but a by itself a, e by it- self e, i by itself i, etc. Fancy spelling " puzzle " p-u b}' itself u-izzard-puz ; izzard-1-e by itself e-izzle-puzzle. Yet I have known a man who, in New England, was taught to spell that way early in this centurj^ One of the Spahis in the illustrations is racking along in a very horsemanlike manner, except that one cannot become reconciled to the nose in the air — it constantly suggests a bit which the horse fears. The other, at first blush, is riding a brute. But a look at him shows that the 16 SPAHI, EQUIPPED FOR "FANTASIYA," MAKING HIS HORSE REAR rise is not horse-play or ugliness ; the rider is forcing the animal to rear as an exhibition of horsemanship. This is by no means the fine performance which the school re- quires, but rather a crude and shallow trick, common at the fantaslyas or liorse-parties, where all the riders of the neighborhood meet to show off tlieir steeds and to let off superfluous steam. The shawl hanging over the croup is the drapery usual at this ceremony- All ceremonials, an- HORSE TRICKS 243 cient and modern, appear to have demanded draping, more or less extensive, of tlie horses. Pictures of the ancient tournament always show the horses draped to the ground. As in the case of every people, one may pick flaws in the Spain's horsemanship ; but despite his want of delicate handling, he is clearly one of the best of horsemen, as he understands the art, and is as devoted to his beast as is the most traditional of Arabs. XLI The Frencli cavalryman rides well, as all mounted men serving a long enlistment do. In Algeria he interests us because of his horse. His saddle is much lilve our old-fash- ioned artillery pattern ; his equipments vary little from the usual. But he has some objectionable ways. In or- der to make his horse walk fast, which he accomplishes well enough, he is, likQ his congener in France, continually drubbing his flanks with his heels. This habit tends to make him grip too much with the calf of the leg, and to turn out his toes in an ungainly fashion. A man ought to ride close and be ready to grip with all the legs he has got ; but one does not like to see the heels constantly held too close. The leg, from the knee down, should be nearly or quite perpendicular — in fact, naturally pendent— a habit which will keep the feet where they properly belong. One finds lamentably unmilitary riding among soldiers in this generation : the habit is marked, even in Berlin or Paris, where a cuirassier or a Uhlan is often seen trotting along, trying to rise and leaning forward for the purpose, when his stirrups are too long to enable him to do so otherwise than with an awkward bump. You never see one of our cavalrymen do this. After observing modern army-riding in most of the countries of the accessible world, I am in- clined to prefer a thoroughly good West Point seat to any ; not the tongs-on-the-wall seat whicli sometimes obtains, l)ut that which most nearly approaches the natural in our usual army-saddle. And be it noted that even the Briton RIDING ENGLISH FASHION 245 of to-day is coming back from the very short stirrups he used to consider essential to fox-hunting, to a seat much more like the bareback. Talking of sticking out the toes, since the abolition of the old style, every rider is subject to the habit. I can remember when the rule was to keep the feet parallel with the horse — a thing never now done, and, be it ac- knowledged, rarely kept to then. We Americans have the only cavalry which rides with hooded wooden stirrups. Perhaps these are not handsome j^^r ^e; but any soldier who has ridden day after day with the thermometer ever so far below zero will bless the man who first invented this protection against frozen feet. And, moreover, if a man is going to turn out his toes, our hooded stirrup quite hides the trick which a brass stirrup makes unduly prominent. The French officers have, of late years, all taken to the English saddle, and ride ostentatiously d VAnglaise, a regular " to cover " gait. There is, all the travelled world over nowadays, nothing more marked than the influence of all tilings British. In my early European tours in the fifties, the Englishman, and especially the English maiden, were outrageously caricatured. The Briton was the butt of all comic stories ; he was the stock-in-trade of the ra- conteur ; proverbial philosophy was fairly shot at him ; nothing about him was acceptable but that universal panacea, the £ sterling. But now the tide has set in his favor ; everything everywhere is so English, you know ; not only his beefsteaks and his tweed suits, but his man- ners and his horsemanship are in every section of the habitable globe ; you are even invited in France to Jive o'doquer with your lady friends. The countries the Briton has overrun have found that he possesses other sterling qual- ities besides the £ s. d. And well it is. An infusion of good ■246 TO COVER STYLE An®-lo-Saxon common-sense has been a distinct benefit all over the Continent ; and the sublimity of British egoism in accepting the change is truly delightful. Were I not a Yankee of the Yankees, might I be a Briton ! He feels that he may seize the best of everything as a right, and takes umbrage if some one has got ahead of him. As a cowboy divides all mankind into ranchmen (the sheep) and tenderfoots (the goats), so the Briton knows but two classes : subjects of her Majest}^ or — what is the modern equivalent of the ^dp/SapoL of the ancient world? PhiUs- tines? He is monumental, your Briton. I love him for his magnificence of self-assertion, his unlimited " side ;" I am disposed to hate him when he treads on my traveller's toes, as now and then he happens to do. Among his imitators are the army men. Ko doubt Continental officers have profited by the bit of English rough-riding they have learned of late 3'ears, but their self-assumed British style looks like overdoing the prac- tical. When smokeless powder shall have brought all uni- forms down to butternut or some other humdrum color, this style will be eminently proper ; but so long as the gay and gaudy is de rigueu?' in the uniform, the method of ridino- ought to correspond. Not that there is the least objection to English horsemanship or English tweed suits. On the contrarv, both are practical, admirable. But to see an officer with red peg-top trousers, gold-laced red cap, a light-blue jacket trimmed "with ribbons and bibbons and loops and lace," and a dangling sabre, on a fiat Eng- lish saddle, and rising to a swinging trot as if he Avere astride a cover-hack, is too much like serving you Veuve Cliquot in a pewter mug to suit my ideas of the appropri- ate. Veiwe Cliquot is good ; so is a pewter mug ; but the twain do not match. Moreover, if a soldier uses his two hands to guide his horse, as these French Anglomaniacs NO ANGLOPHOBIST 247 do, how, forsooth, shall he use his sabre or his carbine ? I must not be construed as objecting to the trot. It is an essential gait, and the one our own army men most con- stantly use as an alternate with the walk. But a soldier should ride a soldier's trot, not a cross-country rider's — at least, when in uniform. Else why the uniform? This being but an outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual discipline, why not preserve the other elements which go to show the soldier ? Pipe-clay is disappearing. It was only a manifestation of discipline at any time ; and as a uniform is exactly this and no more, the soldier's ways should be in keeping with the dress. I am solicitous to avoid the imputation that may be cast upon me of being an Anglophobist. Like Artemas Ward, I scorn the allegation and defy the allegator. What I have heretofore said ought to suffice to prove that no one has a more sincere regard and admiration for most things English than I. Her Gracious Majesty the Queen- Empress has scarce a more loyal subject. Why, I can re- member her way back in 1851, in the Great Exhibition year, when she was still a young queen, and used still not infrequently to be seen in the saddle in the Park. My loyalty to her has never swerved, and my six or seven 3^ears in England have made me almost a Briton, in fact, as my old Salem ancestry truly was up to 1776, of glorious memory. But may I not criticise withal ? Is my loyalty the less because, when I get wrathy, I " write to the Times V In horse sports, as a nation, the English are easily first. I grant it with pleasure, and whenever I take down Whyte Melville or some other charming chron- icler of the hunting- field, I fall in love anew with this splendid people and their ever-green land. But — well, the buts have already been put in. Let us change the subject as radically as we can. God save the Queen ! XLII Of all horse-flesh, so to speak, the patient little com- monplace every-day ass takes the lead. There is no de- nying him the palm. Were I a Homer or a Dante, or eke a Holmes, I would indite an epic, or at least pen an heroic rhyme to the character, strength, and courage of this noblest of the equine race. In every country where se- vere economics are thrust upon the people, the ass comes to the rescue and does the work which no other creature alive can do. He lives on nothing; he is rarely fed — in times of drought or extra hard work a pittance of barley — but is turned loose to find what he may. He is never vicious or obstinate, but works on hard and faithfully till his poor old ears flop downward from age, his head droops from weariness, and he literally falls under his load and dies in his tracks, after serving his often cruel master some score or more of years. When he is put to work as a yearling — for he often is — he does not last so long. I have ridden one at eighteen months which had been trained but two weeks, and yet was gentle, bridle-wise, and well-gaited. Where is there such a horse? The habit of cruelty to the ass, though universal, is sometimes only thoughtlessness. It is bred in the bone. You will see a child cuffing and beating a donkey which is standing under its load at the door, " just to learn how." The utility of the ass is always recognized. yEsop, who tells us that to the ass's prayer for a less cruel master Jove replied that it was beyond even his power to change the THE PATIENT ASS 249 human heart, but that he would do the next best thing and give his supphcant a tough hide, unquestionabl}' knew both men and donkeys. In Mexico, when two Indian farmers meet, they pass the time of day, inquire for each other's wives and children, and then always comes the question, " How is the burro ?" Indeed, as the burro earns the daily bread for the family, this is natural enough. No doubt the h'mar of the East is equally considered ; but he is the victim of man's heedlessness and capacity for cruelty and experimenting. There is one queer asinine trick the Arabs have. "With the notion that the Lord did not know how to make the donkey's nostril, they slit it upward two or three inches "to give him more room to breathe." They say, too, that it improves the tone of his bray, though this may be ques- tioned by all who have listened to his delectable song. Still, the Arab is fairly generous to the little toiler ; there are comparatively few sore -backed donkeys in Algeria, Tunis, and Egypt, which speaks more for the people than can be said of Ital}^ or Spain or Mexico. There is no question that, feeding quite apart, the ass will kill any horse or mule ; and it is clear that, weight for weight and load for load, he daily outdoes the camel. The latter, weighing fifteen hundred pounds, carries five hundred ; the ass weighs two hundred and fifty to four hundred pounds, and carrying one hundred and fifty to three hundred, outwalks the camel by a mile an hour. In the Mexican mines, a donkey which weighs not over five hundred pounds at the outside, will carry a load of ore equal to his own weight out of the mine, go back empty, and work all day. He is fed high to enable him to do this, and does not live long ; but what other mammal can equal this feat for even a week ? The donkey is guided by the voice, a stick, or a rope- 250 SIZE OF ASSES halter. The halter-rope lies on the left side, and is pulled to turn him to the left, or borne across the neck to turn him to the right. The stick is used to touch his neck on either side if you desire him to turn to the other. Or the least raising of the stick suffices; while, if you are walk- ing behind him, a mere touch on either Hank will turn him quickly and surely. It is most commonly the stick which is used, and this serves the double purpose of guiding and striking. But, Lord save the mark ! it is wont to be the man who needs the stick, not the beast. No more patient creature exists ; it is not he who is obstinate or treach- erous, it is his master. Dear, patient ass ! did we but rec- ognize the half of thy virtues, we should glory in being called by thy name, not resent the appellation ! The donkey in the Orient is often very small. I have measured them, full-grown, only thirty-two inches high — no bigger than a St. Bernard ; not so big as some of the prize-winners. I rode one last winter to Abraham's Oak from Hebron, on which my toes touched the ground though I was on a pad ; and I measure but five feet seven. The little fellow seemed to make nothing of my one hundred and fifty pounds, but racked away at a good four and a half miles an hour. On a creature like this a load equal to half his own weight will habitually be put ; his owner will ride atop of the load, and the little hero will go off at a sharpish running-walk and do his twenty-five miles a day. This sounds incredible, but it is literally true. The ass in Algeria often carries three-fourths of his own weight all day long. One sees two men on a donkey which weighs a bare four hundred pounds — a load and a man on a donkey they claim to weigh only two hundred and fifty pounds. The little creature can be bought for seven or eight francs, does during his life the work of a dozen men, and exhibits the virtues of a score of saints. I was tempted COUNTKYMAN ON AN ASS "ARTIFICIAL" GAITS 253 to buy a hundred to send to the Columbian Fair, and a contractor offered to deliver them on board the Marseilles packet at Tunis for seven hundred francs. This is barely half a cent a pound, not counting the virtues. One sees Arabs coming into Constantine with a donkey -load of Avood, which they sell for three francs. They have come twenty -five miles with it ; they sell it, and next day ride the donkey back. As a meal costs them but two cents, the wood nothing, and the donkey does all the work, what seems a small profit for a two or three days' trip is really a good one. And who is it that earns it ? As I have previously observed, all saddle-beasts in the East go what those who would limit the horse to the Eng- lish standard are pleased to call " artificial " gaits. In fact, three-quarters of all the animals in the world wdiich are used for riding do so. Mules broken to saddle always what they call "sidle" or amble; all donkeys running- walk, rack, or amble. They scarcely have to be taught. Little ass-colts often rack alongside of their dams as if there were no other method of progression. I have seen bullocks amble or rack. Why, then, are these paces arti- ficial? They are in reality natural to every member of the equine race— I might say to all four-footed animals. But it is chiefly in our Southern States that these gaits have been studied as an art, and have been improved upon and bred from. The donkey in Algeria is not used for riding by all classes, rich and poor, as he is in Egypt and Syria. In fact, he is rarely seen with a saddle. He has a pad, very simi- lar to the pad on which the bespangled queens of the saw- dust ring dance their short hour to delighted boys and rustics, only more crude and better suited to his diminutive proportions. This pad has no stirrups, and is so wide as to make a seat on it extremely tiring to the uninitiated. 254 ARAB PADS The Arab sits astride or sidewise, and as the pad is rarely oirthed at all, or at best bv a slender cord, it is much like walking on a tight-rope or managing a birch-bark canoe to sit on it, until you "catch on." It is the reverse of our trick of girthing a horse well and then sticking to the sad- dle. The horse, when in the service of a native, is not un- commonly equipped in the same way. Between this pad, which serves equally for riding and loading, and the sad- dle of the Spahi, there is a vast category of sizes and styles ; all, however, much too wide. I have often seen a pair of stirrups improvised by tying two bags together, slinging them across the pad, turning in one corner of each, and thrusting the foot into the pocket thus made. This sounds ingenious, and- is really so, but such a flimsy pre- text for a saddle, or, in fact, all the gear used for saddle or harness all over the Orient, would be cast on the dump- heap by the poorest American farmer. He would not risk his bones witli it. The life of a saddle or a harness is much like that of a fine city vehicle. A swell, for instance, buys a five-hun- dred-dollar bugg3% and uses it three or four years. It then goes to auction, and is bought by some one who runs it in the suburbs for six or eight more. Thence it goes, by another auction sale, to a countryman, who will run it twenty years, unless it sooner meets with the fate of the one-hoss shay. In the Orient you never see saddle or har- ness in any but the latter state. They always look as if thev had never been new. XLIII The Arab is a tall, straight-featured, well-shaped man, varying in color from a dark bronze to a tone quite as white as some Europeans. He is decidedly handsome. Women are apt to be struck by the manly beauty of the Tunisian, and he is indeed a fine specimen. Men have less chance to be struck by the good looks of the Tunisian women, for only the veriest apologies for women are ever allowed outside the harem walls unless closely veiled. I must, however, except the pretty 3"oung Jewess —bless her heart ! — who goes freely about in a sack - coat and tight trousers, and showing her face — bar powder — just as the Lord made it. The Arab is, in his way, cleanl}^ He is supposed to wash his feet before praying, and his hands and face be- fore and after eating — many, in fact, do so ; and he is apt to bathe in streams at not infrequent intervals, unless the weather be too cold. But — and there is in the Orient always a hut on this subject — he can scarcely be gauged as np to our standard of what is next akin to godliness. One sees at the hut doors all too many instances of cerebral insecticide to be reconciled to the Arab as a clean mortal. Xo odor of nationality is, however, apt to exist in a dry climate, so that he is, quoad the nostril, unobjectionable. I am not so sure, by-the-way, that cleanliness is next akin to godliness ; I should be tempted to reverse the terms. If you want to convert a heathen, it is, despite the precedent, clearly a blunder to begin by telling him 256 THE ARAB AS A MAN that all his ancestors are in sheol, whether you yourself be- lieve the statement or not. The more natural process, it seems to me, would be first to dump him into a bath-tub, or the equivalent most handy ; then to fill his stomach ; last, to bring up the religious question. The word bath- tub is generic ; it denotes every physical means of cleanli- ness. Unquestionably, a well -scrubbed, well-fed savage would be more apt to take to the truths of theology than a hungry one grovelling in his native filth. But let us taboo religious discussion as well as political. I may be treading on some good horse friend's toes, though I have found most horsemen liberal in their dogmas, even if old- fashioned in their faith. Despite his good looks and well-knit frame, the value of the Arab as a laborer is not great. He works by fits and starts, and the intervals between fits are long. He can and does at times work hard and fast, but it is only to indulge the longer in laziness by- and -by. Many of the pastoral Arabs who own flocks gauge his value closely ; they hire herdsmen for their food, three dollars, and two sheep a year. Lodging is alfresco most of the time. The shepherd is expected to get along in any weather which will not kill off his herd ; and as to clothing, an Arab herdsman can get on with a minimum. So long as the warp and weft of a bit of cotton cloth will hold together, he can, with the use of thorns for pins, fashion a garment which meets all his requirements. In cold weather he and his sheep or goats herd together in any convenient shelter — under the brow of a hill or behind a clum]) of rocks, or in one of the natural caverns which abound in a slat\" country — and he gets a great part of his warmth from them. Most of the year he can bask in more sunshine than we should like. One can have a deal too much of a good thing, even of THE RICH ARAB 257 old Sol's company. A story is told of a British tar of the ancient order of things who had been cruising on the coast of Africa for several years and was finally ordered home. As his ship sailed up the English Channel, in a fine hearty yellow fog, out of which one could cut chunks with a hatchet, the hard-baked old tar, coming up fi'oni below, drew big inspirations of the home air into his lungs, and " Ah, shipmate," said he, " 'ere's weather for you. None of your blasted sunshine !" He had had too much of a good thino^. In what I sa}^ of the people I am, of course, not referring to the educated, intelligent Arab. He is what well-to-do folk are everywhere. I passed some days with the Caliph of K'sar H'lal, and can truthfully say that I have never met a man with finer instincts, nobler presence, or more abundant courtesy, no part of which came from any source but his own deep character and native training. There are also sheiks in the same vicinity who would murder you for your money until you had broken bread with them ; but so there are in America, and breaking bread with these will by no means serv^e you. There are rich and well-bred city Arabs who have learned many ways from the Franks with whom the}^ come in contact ; but I prefer their own native customs. The unspoiled, w^ell-mannered, educated Arab can scarcely be improved on — save in what we are vain enough to call intelligence. But who shall measure intelligence? Theirs sufiices for them, and ours appears to them heathenish. To learn a few thousand texts from the Koran affords them an altogether better culture than all our science and art and letters — so they claim. They all dress alike — Arabs, Berbers, Moors, and the rest. Item : one " b'iled rag," not the b'iled rag of the wild and woolly "West, but a yard or tw^o of cotton cloth, cut off a 17 258 THE ARAB'S CLOTHES piece and sewed up bag -fashion, with holes made in it for the head and arms, now and then affording the luxury of short sleeves ; and which under no circumstances what- soever is b'iled until age has withered and custom staled it into actual rags. Item : if well off, a sleeveless buttoned vest. Item : real " bags," to adopt our young hunting swell's term, for trousers. Sartorially speaking, these are made of cotton, and are literally like a bag whose depth is equal to a little more than the distance from waist to knee, and whose width equals thrice or more times the distance a man can stretch apart his legs. Cut out the two corners of the bottom of the bag, step through the holes, and tie the stuff — hemmed or not according to fancy — around the knees ;, then gather up the mouth around the waist, and you have the Plymouth Rock pants du jjays. There is thus left pendent between the Arab's legs a bag big enough to hide himself in. Less stuff will suffice if there be not enough on hand. The origin and utility of this leg-gear it Avere vain to inquire. Item : one scarf to go a number of times round the waist. Item ; if cold, an ad- ditional shirt-like garment of woollen goods coming down below the knees. Item : one burnoose, or peculiarly-cut cloak of white or, in Tunis, blue woollen stuff, with a very roomy hood, exceeding loose, so as to wrap about one and throw over the shoulder. Item : one fez, with some cotton cloth twisted up rope-fashion to wrap around it in the guise of a turban. Item : one pair of shoes (or not, as the case may be), made of anything from woven rushes to Morocco leather. There are some variations to all this, but they are slight. The Arab is everywhere clothed in bags, riglit or wrong side up. In this dress, or so much of it as he can afford, the native lives day and night, from early manhood to old age, and when he dies he is bui-ied in it, or the gar- TROUSERS 259 ments go to his son and heir. A very few working city Arabs wear read3^-raade clothing from France, England, or perchance even America. More's the pity ! It sounds the death-knell to national costume. Where shall we go next to find an unspoiled nation, ex- cept away to the interior of Asia or Africa ? The ver}- remotest corners of the earth are invaded by ready-made, clothes. If the Bible could be introduced with half the ease of these abominations, this generation would see the millennium with its own eyes. When I say Bible, by-the- way, I mean the Sermon on the Mount, and not Jonah and the Whale, as an article of faith. Far beyond the reach of the railroad you see graceful national costumes supplanted by cheap European clothing. Now, I maintain that national character resides largely in legs. Years ago you needed only to look as high as a man's knees to tell his nationality. Think of the delicious legs of the old-time Italian peasant — real stage-brigand legs, pure and unde- filed — now chased into inaccessible mountain recesses! Think of the legs of the Russian peasant of to-da}^, all boots and padding, no more to be unwrapped than an Egyptian mummy ! But all fin de slede legs look alike. It is only when you get way beyond the path of Cook's Tours that you find either a type of clothing or the grace- ful looseness of garment which ignorance of civilization breeds. I believe that no trouser-wearing human being, unless he be a much - travelled man, can have any idea of the horrible perversity of the cut of the Oriental home-made pants ; it is atrocious, heart-rending. The variety of bad- ness in style must be imagined ; it cannot be described, but — well, it reminds me of an incident, the real origin of the story as since sometimes narrated. It was very many years ago, when the now godlike Poole was struggling 260 BAGGY KNEES into celebrity. A friend of mine, Mr. Hand, a city solic- itor, had all through life hated his legs, principally because his trousers bagged at the knees with that pertinacity which, among inanimate objects, only trousers can exhibit. " Why don't you go to Poole's ?" said a peripatetic, fla- neur c\w\y friend; "his trousers never bag; look at mine!" So off goes Hand to Poole's, states his case, and, under the assurance that the forthcoming garments shall not bag at the knees, orders several pairs at three times the custom- ary price. They by -and -by came home, and were de- lightful to look upon, to incase one's legs in ; but alas, in a se'nnight or so, the telltale bagginess began to be seen. In a rage, off marched Hand to his Sartorial Highness, de- termined to have the )aw of him. " It is not necessary to look at them, Mr. Hand," calmly replied the self-satisfied ninth to Hand's aggressive salutation ; "our trousers never bag at the knees." " But there they are— as bad as any eight-and-sixpenny pair made in the city !" screamed irate Hand. Adjusting his eye-glass, the apparently surprised but none the less confident tailor condescendingly stooped, smoothed his hand down the front of the garment in dis- pute, gazed at the knees a moment, and then, taking from a distance a side view of the same, and di'opping his glass Avitli a half -supercilious, half- pitying smile: "Why, Mr. Hand," quoth he, " you have been sitting down in those trousers !" They were park trousers, to be promenaded in, no more. The Arab in Algeria and Tunis may be dressed in rags and tatters, but he is no beggar. Only the blind beg. This is really a point in his favor, and it is a great relief from the mendicancy of many other countries to find a poor population which does not hang on your skirts for alms. So much can, however, not be said of his brother beyond tlie desert, nor can it be said of any count i-y where, owing FINE FEATHERS 261 to the folly of tourists, the word hachsheesh is current coin. The rich man among the Arabs dresses richly. His shirt is of line linen. His inside vest is buttoned, the out- side one is worn loose. A long paletot often takes the place of the latter. It is cut part way down from the throat, and the loose armholes allow the arras to be held in or outside. The wide trousers are bound about the waist by a costly scarf. Over all is frequently worn the long, loose tunic, cut V shape at the neck, and with short sleeves set on low down. The hands are as frequently kept inside as out — ^in winter for warmth, in summer from habit ; and an Arab reaches out from the Y at the neck for anything he wants handed him with a peculiarly lim- ited motion, which at first you fail to comprehend. The burnoose is an out-of-doors garment, and the fez may or may not have the turban -cloth. The swell wears what look like European socks, and his slippers, usually trodden down at heel by the common or careless, are handsomely embroidered, or else of fine morocco, red or yellow. The calf of the leg is naked. Parts of this dress are dropped at intervals according to the season. There are few persons more really magnificent than a well-dressed Arab sheik, or a man of wealth. In our days of business suits which clothe all kinds and conditions of men, the dress is uncom- monly attractive — on an Arab. That it would work in with our habits one would hardly allege. But the trou- sers, of whatever cut, have one manifest advantage — they do not, cannot, bag at the knee, whether you sit or stand. XLIV To come back to our quadrupeds. This dress is, of all clothing, the one you and I would select as being most illy adapted to horseback work ; and yet the Arab is equally at home in the saddle or sitting with his legs crossed under him. Like all every-day and all-day horse- men, he is perfect within his lines. Some people yield him the palm among all • riders, an opinion which I do not share. He might perhaps be said to occupy the highest position among horsemen, in that he has bred and edu- cated the most docile race of horses known to man, and the one which has given the civilized world the impress of thoroiiffh blood. But as a rider I am inclined to think that our own skilful equestrian could beat him in riding over a country, in rounding-up a big bunch of ugly, stam- peded cattle, in the twists and brushes of polo, in school- riding, or in almost any duty or pleasui'e requiring in its kind horsemanship of the highest order. This has really been demonstrated in some things ; but, ex uno, we must not fall into the error of discere omnes. The Arab, when he is a horseman, is a superb one, even though he does not come within our canons of the art. When the horse is only a beast of burden or a means of transportation, the Arab is no better than his ilk elsewhere. When, as in the desert, the horse is his pet, his companion by day, his dream by night, the Arab is, in a sense, incomparable. No master can be more kind. No dog is more intelligent than the dark, liquid-eyed mare he lias bred and trained, whose ARABIAN ^lARES 263 ancestresses a hundred generations back his ancestors have loved and trusted. This mare — would that we hu- man beings had not been civilized out of so many of our animal qualities ! — will follow him day and night. She would fret her soul out at being hitclied to a post, and her master would scorn to tie lier. She will stand immov- able in the midst of danger and fright which would make any of our horses frantic. She will carry her master through fire and w^ater. She will unflinchingly face wounds and death so long as the hand which has fed her is laid upon her neck. She will stand over her disabled lord till help arrives, or she will go alone to seek it and return with it to find him. She will kneel for him to mount, and she will bear him bravely home, if she falls a sacrifice to her devotion at the door of her master's tent. These are not always fables. The horse, treated as he should be, generation after generation, develops a rare in- telligence, and shows as noble an affection as the dog. But, as above said, even in Arabia, this horse is the pearl of great price. Thrice happy the sheik or caliph who truly claims to own one ! In the desert proper the horse is not always shod ; in the stony localities he must be. The Frank shoe in Al- gerian cities, owing to the European influence, is driving out the old Arabian plate. The foot of the unshod horse is everywhere and always strong and healthy. The Ara- bian foot is, in fact, uniformly good. I have scarcely seen a horse point, even on the pavement. There are few interferers ; some overreach in harness, but not of course in the saddle, as no unspoiled Arab can be persuaded to ride a trot, and this is the only gait in which the habit can prevail. XLY One of the great events of the year in Algerian mat- ters equine are the races at Biskra, on the edge of the des- ert, or in what one might more properly call the first oasis. In Tunis the fantaslya is the fad. One can scarce- ly compare the Biskra races to our own, but they bring out some rather fine specimens of horse-flesh, and have some curious features: Among these are camel -races, at which some of the best running camels compete, not at long distance, which is their great power, but at short distances for speed — a thing they are not remarkable for, according to the creed of these modern days. The running camel is to the porter camel as the thor- ough-bred to the mongrel cart-horse — the one has speed in a certain sense and vast endurance at speed ; the latter has no speed, but simply great endurance under weight or at traction. I saw a couple of laboring camels, worth about a hundred and twenty-five dollars apiece, each do- ing quite the work of a pair of horses, ^vhich were run- ning an olive - crushing mill belonging to my friend, the caliph, on three-hour shifts, day and night, and had been doine: it for a number of months. Such a camel will car- ry five hundred pounds a great many consecutive hours. They eat little and drink less — actually considerably less — than a horse ; and their excretions are correspondingly small. The Biskra races are got up mainly by the Europeans, but the great delight of the Arab horseman is ihQfanta- BICHARI CAMEL-RIDEUS, UPPER EGYPT slya, and they always have one or more such events. The entries to these number all manner of horsemen, armed and unarmed, who ride more or less wild ingures to more or less monotonous drumming music, and who end by a most excited and exciting pot-j^ourri of feat riding. They stand in their stirrups and throw their guns in the air, whirl them about in the most approved warlike style, and lire them at intervals in what seems an uncalled for and dangerous fashion until you know that they are loaded only with blank-cartridge. The horses for the moment par- take the enthusiastic bedevilment of their masters, and rear, wheel, kick, buck, rush, stop, turn, and twist for all the world like a bunch of broncos after a winter's rest, 266 THE "FANTASIYA" the men shouting meanwhile, yelling, screaming like so many demons. No picture can do justice to the kaleido- scopic fervor and wildness of the scene, if many riders are engaged in it. It is a seething whirlpool of wild, unmean- ing, half-merry, half-fanatical excitement, in which no end of excellent horsemanship comes to the fore. From time to time the riders stop and rank themselves for a rest on one side ; then out come individuals to show what their steeds can do. They pirouette and dance a while, and then make a rush at full gallop to one or otlier side, stop suddenly, and wheel about. There is no specific art in what they do ; each man has trained his horse on his own untrained ideas. They liave a close seat, clinging with their heels, and exhibit a great deal of skill, in their gy- ratory exercises ; but once seen, the fantasiya, like a circus, loses its interest. All semi-wild nations do about the same tricks on horseback. I think our Indian, or a Cossack, will easily excel them all, while nothing I have ever seen in fantasiyas in the faintest degree approaches the fine work of the school-trained horse in the hands of a master of the art. The one depends on speed and violent motion ; the other on slow and rhythmic move- ments, vastly more diiflcult to execute, and requiring a system of education which i\\e fantaslya work quite lacks. The one is a sailors' hornpipe rapidly played on a fiddle ; the other is an adagio of Schumann on an Amati. Here is one of the Arabian horsemen, ready to take part in i\\e fantasiya. His seat and steed show the type well; man and horse are what you are wont to see. In action tliis horse will show to decidedly better advantage. The docile nature of tlie Arabian robs him of much of his beauty in a picture at rest. Yet if you examine him stand- ing, you will find man}^ points to commend, few to con- demn. "RIDING HOME" 269 As you perceive, from this man's seat, a spur would be of no use to him, and a decided irritation to his well-man- nered mount ; for an Arab of the peo])le can no more forego the luxury of beating time on his horse's ribs than an Indian. Even when riding Avith counterless slippers and without stirrups, he manages to keep up the swinging of his legs, and yet he never loses a slipper. An occa- sional stirrup is made with a sharp point on the inside to use in lieu of a spur on the heel. This wide, flat stirrup is not uncomfortable. It is curved upward, and affords a means of resting the foot b}' constant change of position. The Arab usually thrusts his foot home in it. In fact, nearly all hoi'semen do " ride home." The cowboy, unless he has them hooded, wears the big wooden stirrups against his ankle. Our trooper, with the hooded stirrup, cannot thrust his foot beyond the point where his toe touches the hood ; but if perchance he has a pair of hoodless w^ooden stirrups he is apt to get his foot well in. It is a natural thing to do, and all natural riders do it. The military man who uses a brass stirrup, and the riding -school man or those who take him as a model, are the only ones wiio hold the stirrup under the toe or the ball of the foot. XLYI The enormous hat sometimes worn by the village Arab is an outgrowth of a heat and sunshine which even the natives cannot endure without protecting their heads. The turban has come from the same cause. In all trop- ical countries some means of avoidino; the dano;er of sun- stroke is universal, though the natives can stand a sun which would be fatal to a Frank. In India, Europeans who have to be much in the sun often wear a cork or quilted cushion inside the coat down the spine from neck to waist ; for any part of the vertebral column is sensi- tive to excessive heat. The top or front of the head is much less so tlian the base of the brain ; whence the wear- ing of the turban on the back of the head or the helmet, or the pugree or its equivalent. Animals, from inherited ability to resist its dangers, do not often suffer from the intense heat, which, in summer, registers, they say, 110° Fahrenheit and upwards in the shade, while in the sun one may almost do the family cooking. Still, in many places, horses, especially if imported from a temperate climate (as the Australian waler in India), are better for a hood over the head. This big hat is cpiite common in Tunis, is made of plaited straw, and is heavier even tlian a Mexican som- brero. The lieavier the head-gear the safer the man from sunstroke and really the more comfortable. The Tunisian countryman rides not a saddle V)ut a pad, and this is more generally useful, as it can be employed FKENCH IN TUNIS 273 for a pack better than for riding, but it will serve a turn at that. An Arab saddle is uncomfortable enough ; to ride a pad is the height of misery. As a rule, it has no stirrups, but they are occasionally present, and then not fastened but thrown loosely across the pad, which is very thick, extremely wide, and frequently has no girth what- ever. It runs up over the withers and back beyond the coupling. A habit of balancing keeps the rider and pad both in place. With a horse of any spirit girths are in- dispensable ; still, a horse will give a good deal of a shy vrithout throwing either man or pad, if the man has caught the balance-trick. Since the French assumed what they call " financial control " of Tunis, the roads have been improved j9a7•^ passu with the rest of matters. Most of the roads before they came were only worn saddle or camel paths ; in the interior there is still nothing else. On the coast were a few mud roads, able to accommodate the rough vehicles occasionally owned by the natives. Along the road there is uniformly a mud-bank thrown up from the ditch dug on either side to drain it ; a similar bank, for irrigating purposes, is put around every enclosed field, and each one is crowned by the Barbary fig or prickly-pear cactus. This plant grows everywhere, is killed only by frost which al- most never comes, and bears in abundance a watery fruit almost as big as an apple. This is the one means of stav- ing off starvation which the Arab possesses when his crops fail, as they sometimes do in seasons of drought. No care need be given to the plant, which often grows to be ten feet high. The Arab's cultivation is the barest apology. All he does is to sow his seed in December or January on the untouched soil, in among the stubble of last cro23, then scratch it in with what he calls a plough, but what is only 18 274 SCANT RATIONS a carved iron -pointed forked stick, and leave the rest to Allah. His crops are not unapt to fail unless there be goodly rains. If there is enough, the soil yields plentifully by April or Ma}^ In the summer there is no rain ; the earth is like a furnace seven times heated, and nothing can grow. The Barbarv fig" is then the saving clause in TUNISIAN IIAT the Arab's existence. It is lucky for him that generations of scant rations have got him used to eating s})arsely. It is amazing how little the people of hot climates — unless they are of European stock — can get along with. A hand- ful of rice three times a day enables tlie Japanese coolie to drag you in his jinrikisha a good forty miles; or the same footl will carry the Calcutta coal-heaver through a EATING FOR WARMTH 2V5 long day's toil. He needs little ; but when he can get it he will eat heavily, they say. Northern people have the trick of eating for two pur- poses — warmth and aliment. The Eskimo consumes enor- mous quantities of blubber, but the bulk of it goes to keep alive the fire in the human stove, without which he would freeze to death. The good half or more of what we North- ern Europeans eat is from an inherited tendency to " shovel in coal ;" only a small part is assimilated for nourishment ; and we carry the trick of eating wherever we go — liver or no liver. But so much is not essential in a hot climate,, and the native population learns to live on a quantity (to say nothing of quality) which to us would be the shortest of commons. I have never been able to reduce the av- erage food consumed by the Oriental to ounces ; but com- pared, say with our army ration, I fancy it would be less than half the weight, perhaps less than a third. At the same time, when food can be had, the Oriental will vie with his Occidental brother in eating ; and the rich are often notorious gluttons. The poor make a virtue of ne- cessity. There is a curious fact bearing on this stoking theory which is well known among the lumbermen in our Eastern States. The capacity of the horses they use out in camp to keep warm is gauged by the amount they can eat and di- gest. They are mostly small horses, but tough and rugged creatures, of " Morgan " pattern. Unless a horse will eat up clean a full bucket of oats three times a day, he is con- sidered useless for this work. He will " starve with cold," and the}^ send him back to the settlements where he can be blanketed. More than half he consumes o-oes tlirouo-h his system merely to supply carbon to warm him ; his di- gestive apparatus assimilates such part as is needed for alimentation. The Indian pony worries through the winter 276 LUMBERMAN'S HORSE because he is not worked, so that the httle he gets goes for fuel, and not to replace tissue lost by hibor ; and also because his ancestry has worried through the same trials, and he is their fittest survivor. But the lumberman's horse comes of stabled stock — a very different creature — and must be kept warm by artificial means, or extra food. The Oriental horse partakes of this hotclimate quality to a certain extent, and is fed much less than ours ; but, as with men, I have been unable to gauge his relative pounds of consumption to my satisfaction. In the country you can get no reliable information, nor do they feed by meas- ure or by rule ; in the cities and in the army they fall par- tially into Frank ways, and feed more according to our measure. XLYII When you get far enough away from the every-dav trav- eller and come in contact with the "sure-enough," simon- pure Arab caliph or sheik, you often find a character above reproach, a personal bearing graceful, high-toned, and nobly simple, and a courtesy, truth, and kindness which are a revelation to us prosaic Anglo-Saxons. I am proud to possess the friendship of such a man. He was my host — Si Nassour ben El Hadj Salem, Caliph of K'sar H'lal. With this gentleman — -and a gentle man he was in every sense — I spent some days not far from the ruins of ancient Thapsus. I had a neat and artistic-lookmg Arabic letter from the French authorities, who, by reason of their finan- cial control, will soon transform Tunis, like Algeria, into a French province. And it is, no doubt, better for the land, save only for the loss of its picturesqueness, and tliis is a loss indeed. The Bey of Tunis has but little real authority left, and can devote his abundant leisure to the society of his four hundred wives, to whom (or should I say to which ?) a new one, usually a Circassian girl, is added by each incoming by - monthly steamer from the East. He holds court once a week in the old city palace, amuses himself by chopping off a few criminals' heads, and again retires to his country palace near La Marsa. I could not read the letter which was my safe-conduct, but some time after a scribe translated it to me in French. Here it is in English 278 MY CALIPH "Praise to God, the Only. "To the honorable, the bous and sheiks of the township of M'Kalta, whom may God replenish with happiness! After the salutation and the mercy of God, the respectable the Colonel, bearer of these presents, comes among you, into your township, to make a trip for his gratifica- tion. We recommend him to you most particularly. He will be your welcome guest. "Written by the humble after -named, under God, Tauchon, Civil Controller at Sousa, the 23d Djoumada 2d, 1309. "(Sig.) C. Tauchon," and an official seal. The date is that of the Hegira. Armed with this screed and accompanied by an escort of Spahis and an interpreter, I started for the interior. As kick would have it, there are two M'Kaltas, one being within the jurisdiction of Iv'sar H'lal. I readied this M'Kalta, and presented my letter to the wrong man, as I had intended to go to the other M'Kalta ; but the wrong man proved to be distinctly the right one, for he was the most noted chief in that part of the country, and my safe- conduct was of a nature to be respected by every one. The caliph received me with literally open arms. lie was sitting in receipt of custom — the Arabs coming in to pay their annual tax on olive-trees, which, though but a part of a cent per tree, amounted as a total to a very large sum — and gave himself up to me at once, adjourning all other business, and bidding several supplicants come on tlio morrow. This struck me as an interruption to busi- ness ; but as time is by far the least vahial)le of the pos- sessions of an Arab, and every one was doubly com])on- sated for any delay by the sight of a Frank — about one of whom turned up there every two or three years — the act was b}^ no means strained. Coffee was at once served — such nn aroma of ])uro Mocha I had never tasted before — and we sat (h)\vn, lie and 1 and some o[ tlie sheiks wlio IN THE INTEEIOR 279 remained, cross-legged or upright, as far as to each was comfortable. Through the medium of my interpreter's Frenche of Stratteforde atte Bowe, and still worse Ara- bic — which, curiously, he could speak, but neither read nor write — we talked hour after hour, as other guests, lured by the stranger, dropped in to swell the circle. I soon saw that I must not expect to regain Sousa and catch the steamer I aimed for, and I was correct. But it AYas better so. The whole experience was a rare treat. In all my travels I have never met a man more fit for the society of princes than Si N'assour ben El Hadj Salem. Of tall, full growth, he had a face of great dignity and beauty, a smile any woman might envy or fall a victim to, manners gracious and courteous and anticipating as we Teutonic rustics — more's the pity — so rarely see m our soi-disant civilized intercourse, and a bearing ever}'' inch a — caliph. He had inherited his caliphate from an uncle, and was highly considered by the French. I spent some days under his care, eating out of the same dish — and with my fingers at that, for though my interpreter and I had provided ourselves with forks and spoons I preferred to imitate my host — sleeping in his own soft, hand-made blankets, and journeying to and fro with him in the neighborhood to all the places I wished to visit in the footsteps of Ctesar. He would not let me out of his sight, and yet his presence was not for a moment de trojp^ nor his courtesy overmuch. He furnished me with his best steed, and a fine fellow he was, and rode with me wherever I went or came. I had all too numerous opportunities of judging how little heed Orientals pay to their own or any one else's time. Whenever we would pass through a village, or near by some friendly sheik, we were constrained by po- lite insistence to come in and break bread. This was not 280 ARAB FOOD a ceremony to be lightly thrust aside, nor indeed easy so frequently to go through. These simple folk saw a Frank so rarely that I was like an odd specimen of fene naturm. So little did they know of what lay beyond their horizon that even my host had once only been in the City of Tunis ; scarce another in the country round had even been to Sousa, The word Frank had no definite mean- ing, except that the Franks dwelt beyond the only sea of which they knew — the Mediterranean ; and they recog- nized no difference in the French, Germans, Italians, Span- iards, English. They had never heard of the Atlantic, nor of America. I identified m3"self by telling them that I lived in the land where the cotton-plant grew ; and as they all wore cotton .goods of English manufacture, this was to them a pleasure to know. When I told them, in days' journeys of a horse, how far off my country was, they " AUahed !" in a marvellous fashion. My watch and chain were a great charm to them, and they never tired of examining a pair of gossamer rubber shoes I ^vore, and every one wanted to see me stand in a pan of water, and then show my dry feet Avithin. The elasticity of a few rubber bands I had in my pocket was again a wonder. A gross of such would have bought out half M'Kalta. Tliey were very children, and yet delightful in their grace, dignity, and politeness. The usual repast was seethed kid's flesh (not bad eating by-the-way), or lamb, and the national dish, koosh-koosh, a sort of wheaten preparation which resembles cooked rice, and is eaten with a pepper- sauce, was a trul}^ delicious species of curry. The dexter- ity in tearing the meat apart with the fingers of one hand was marvellous. Once I was offered some native wine (vile is no word for it), and when I asked how it came that, among sons of the Propliet, there was wine made, they laughingly said that, of course, no one drank it; and MY FRIEND THE CALIPH A GENTIiEMAN 283 yet there was a good deal made and sold. When they learned that their guest had lost his leg in battle, and could not sit cross-legged, they absolved me with great unction from the position usually demanded by polite rules, and made me very comfortable, though I thought I was narrowly watched to ascertain that I was not prevar- icating, as the fact seemed inexplicable to them. I could write a book anent my Arab friends, but must refrain. Suffice it that I was entertained like a prince, and that I grew fond of my courtly host as I sincerely believe he grew of me. On parting he kissed me on both cheeks, called me brother, bent his forehead to the ground, and told me that his head was at my lifelong service; conjured Allah to see me back to my own roof- tree (ridge-pole he called it in Arabic), and placing his right hand first on his heart and then to his lips, bade me what I think was an honestly regretted farewell. We had become good friends, and I hope to welcome him some day at home — for Si N'assour ben El Hadj Salem, little travelled as he is, thinks of coming to America in this year of grace, on an errand too long to detail, but which proves both his enterprise and intelligence, and his care for his people's welfare. I would have given much to get a picture of this caliph as he sat his fine Arabian. I can but give a distant approach to it, in the photograph of another man of that ilk. As it happened, my friend had several good horses ; but it does not follow because a man is an Arab and a caliph, and rich besides, that he has any at all — except for ordi- nary transportation or the use of his servants. He may prefer camels or asses. Some sheiks never leave the place where they hold sway, never move about, and need horses as little as a knowledge of Greek. My caliph, to tell the 284 GENTLE JUSTICE truth, rarely rode ; but he could ride and did know a good horse. One day the caliph asked me to sit beside him while he held court. I did so, and was witness to a number of Oriental scenes of strongly dramatic interest. The usual litigants were at odds about land or money matters, but the decision of the caliph, after a hearing, generally about a half-hour long, seemed to be readily accepted — as of course it had to be. The quiet, earnest attention and final summing up of the caliph were in strilving con- trast to the voluble fervor of the applicants , I could see whence came his very great influence. One case was that of a father, whom his son, some seventeen or eighteen years old, obstinately refused to obey. The father besought the caliph to compel his son to do his bidding, the son complained of his father's treat- ment. The father opened his case with apparent violence (Oriental fury, however, often goes for naught), and the son was equally angry, but sullen withal. The caliph had the right to punish the son in any way, by imprisonment in chains or stripes ; but after listening attentively to all each had to say, he held up his hand to end the evidence, and everything in the room at once was still. His face was a beautiful picture. He began in a low, sweet, but rapid voice — all Orientals speak rapidly — dwelling on some of the long vowels in a musical tone as delicious as Salvini's Italian, and with an utterance which ran from a deep, rich base to tlie higli soprano, A^et perfectly natural withal. The son, I was told, had been extremely guilty, according to Tunisian notions; but the caliph sought other means than severity to accomplish his end. His words were addressed alternately to father and son, and the effect on each as he proceeded was marked. He s})oke with evident authority. ;nid yet with a persuasive tone, wliich A PENITENT SON 285 at times was pleading, at times convincing. As he went on I could see the lad's face soften — a quiver flew at times across liis mouth ; as he had come in I thought him ill-looking — I found he was really a handsome lad. The caliph went on, plainly telling the youth how he had failed in duty and common-sense alike, and explaining to him that where lay his filial piety there lay also his present and future happiness. I turned from one to the other, for each was a study of character of extreme in- terest. ISTot a word of all the judge said could I under- stand ; but the tone was such as to yield the hearer its closest import. In a moment more came the climax. The lad had been swallowing his emotion in great gulps, and now, with an outburst of sobs, he broke into a flood of tears, threw his arms around his expectant father's neck, and wept audibly. Recovering himself he turned to the caliph, said a few low-spoken words, and waited for what more he had to say. Bidding him continue on his good resolution, the caliph w^aved an end to the matter, and father and son left the court-room with arms around each other's shoulders. I have rarely been witness to a more impressive scene, and the dignity, graceful diction, and beautiful voice of the caliph have lingered with me ever since. But I am afraid that the title to this volume has been given amiss. It should have been "Yarns of a Globe- trotter, and. Incidentally, Horseflesh." I must strive to keep to my subject. XLVIII HoESEs must be averaged. It will not do to select the exceptional horse for description lest the reader fall into the assumption that all other horses resemble him, or, at least, that the majority do so. This is, indeed, not entirely an error. In the Orient all horses have some of the marks of Arabian blood. There is a singular beauty to some of the points of the Arabian which, even in the commonest stock, never gets quite lost. You rarely see a horse with- out one or more of these, and an odd specimen will now and then crop out among the lowly bred country horses which has all the points of some noble ancestor. Heredity is an obstreperous thing to deal with. In families which, ever so far back, have had some trace of negro blood, perhaps quite forgotten, it is said that a Guinea-black baby will occasionally turn up, to the great distress of all concerned and the suspicion of many. Among the Arabs, barring the desert tribes, it is, as elsewhere, the rule that only swells have fine beasts. So it is with us ; and after seeing many horses in many lands, I must give it as my opinion that the " Kentucky farmer" rides, on the average, a far finer, better trained, and abler horse than the Arab sheik. Moreover, there are — as I have before observed — more splendid specimens of horse- (losli on the breeding-farms of America than there are in any Oriental studs, quite apart from the greater size of our thorough-hred. By-the-way, tliis same Kentucky farmer is an odd tyi)e KENTUCKY FARMERS 287 of soil toiler, lie owns a fine old homestead (a country gentleman's ""place" or ""estate" in reality, but he calls it a " farm "), perhaps inherited for generations, and boasts acres as broad and beautiful as an English park, lie gets into the saddle after a decidedly late breakfast for a farmer, rides around to visit his crops and the stock, gives a few directions to his headmen, and then canters off into — let us say Lexington, for a drink and a chat and billiards, or some other amusement with similar farmers, and God gives the increase. On work of the easiest the Kentucky Blue Grass farmer grows rich. Just think of the toil and moil of our poor New England farmers, your ancestors and mine, good friend, and for what ? Well, for TUNISIAN WITH TWO-YEAR-OLD BARB 288 POINTS OF ARABIAN the strength of loin, the unclouded brain, and the iron will which has begotten and bred the sturdiest, most intel- ligent, and most enterprising race the sun has ever shone upon! The New England farmer has raised men and women ; as for crops — why, they are crop enough. Some well -qualified judges maintain that the English thorough-bred, by generations of breeding exclusively for speed has lost bone and structural strength, and it is sug- gested that a cross with the old Arabian desert blood would be a benefit. It is true that the one -mile speed has grown relatively beyond the five, ten, or twenty mile speed ; but this does not necessarily mean that the endur- ance of the thorough-bred has decreased. It takes — teste " Ten Broeck " — as much endurance, in a certain fashion, for a horse to run a mile in 1.39|, as it does for him to run four miles in 7.15f , the average of the latter per mile be- ing 1.49 ; but to breed for short bursts of very high speed has perhaps a tendency to overdevelop the greyhound type. And no doubt there is a certain weediness in some families of racers. Be this as it may, it cannot be claimed that the Southern saddle-horse lacks bone. Many fine- bred ones are up to great weight, and most have large round barrels, and by no means too slender a skeleton. They are as nearly perfect as may be for saddle (not rac- ing) speed, for carrying ability, and for gaits and endur- ance. The racer is quite another horse, but he, too, has more framework than his English cousin. There are a number of points which must be granted to the Arabian. Eliminating the wretched little country horse, of small value because overworked and underfed, the average horse of good stock has excellent bone and an exceptionally well-built structure. The shoulder has a pe- culiarly fine slope ; the back is very short above, and the line is very long below ; the reach from top of rump to PROUD SHEIKS 289 hough is extra long ; the neck rises just as it should from the withers ; the head is put on just riglit ; the legs and feet cannot be criticised. The superlatives are purposely em- ployed. Moreover, there is a certain ease and grace of movement that is essentially Arabian, which comes of a skeleton put together on good principles, and then well clad with muscle and sinew. On the other hand, while our long, lanky, bony, often somewhat ungainly performer lacks the Arabian's symmetry of looks and movement, he impresses you with the ability to run and repeat, to carry you through to the death, which even the best horse in the Orient does not convey. The line Arabian is singularly handsome ; there is no form of words which will explain the eifect he has on the horse-lover w^ho is attracted by the artistic as well as the '' horsy " points. He unques- tionably possesses grit and endurance, but 1 believe that in losing some of his grace we have gained in stamina in stock of equal grades, while our every-day teamster, coach- er, and business horse can readily discount him by his supe- rior weight ; and this weight, while it may, coupled to our hard roads, be more trying to legs and feet, does not ap- pear to have deteriorated the useful qualities of our animal. The illustration show^s the size of no end of colts in daily use in the East. This was a two-year old — we should call it a yearling from its looks, and weedy at that. Still the colt w^as able to do a good day's w^ork ; and though such a little creature vasij be much abused, his legs and feet will stand up under it in a marvellous manner, ex- plicable onlv by the fact that his ancestors, for a thousand generations, have stood on the ground out - of - doors in- stead of in ammonia-soaked stalls. The rider appears tall; in truth, he was but about five feet eight. The colt was little above thirteen hands. The term sheik in the Orient is about as universal as 19 A TUNISIAN SIIEIK cap'n or jedofe in most country districts in our part of the world, though miHtary distinction is not colloquially conferred on account of the number of chimneys a man's house may have, as it is said to be south of Mason and JJixon's line; there are few chimneys. The sheik before us boasts no such architectural luxuries. But though he may live in a hut of rushes and his women may do the cooking alfresco^ rain or shine, he is wont to own a good horse. And he is a proud fellow, this penniless sheik; proud of his religion, proud of his nationality, proud of his lineage — almost as proud as he is of tlie lineage of his high- LAZY SHEIKS 291 bred mare, on the feats of wliose forebears he will descant by the hour and multipl}' by three the miles they may have done between sun and sun. He is rarely separated from his old Hintlock, perhaps the most harmless fire-arm which exists — to the enemy. He does nothing for a living ex- cept to loaf ; his inherited dignity — for was not his great- uncle a sheik before him? — forbids him to work. He owns a few olive-trees, some little flocks and herds, an ass, and a horse or two , his women cultivate a small gar- den-patch and an acre or so of wheat; the prickly -pear and date-palm are there at need ; and if he can worry through the distress of the few rainy weeks without soak- ing into pulp, God's sunshine and fresh air are his for the rest of the year. He is content with little to eat ; gener- ations of sparse food have robbed the poor Arab of any semblance of gluttony ; strong drink is prohibited by the Koran, and, curiously, the injunction is Avont to be obeyed ; but give him the long daylight for loafing, and anything on four legs to carry him, and he is happy. He little reeks what his wives and daughters are. Thev, poor souls — stay! they have no souls according to his belief, and may not even go into the mosque to pray. " Why should they pray, forsooth, having no souls to pray for ?" he will ask you; they, poor creatures! live in the reflect- ed happiness of their lord. XLIX When we cross the Libyan desert — which from its west- erly limits is usually done by a prosaic Mediterranean trip back to Malta or Italy, and thence to Alexandria, rather than aboard a "ship of the desert," for it is easy to go around and all but impossible to go across this merciless Avaste — we come to a more marked type of the so-called Arabian than we find in either Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, or Tripoli. The first thing which strikes the horseman on reaching Egypt is the high -carried tail. The close- hugged tail which to such a degree disfigures the other- wise admirable mount on the west of the Libyan desert is here . replaced by the fine upright haunch and high -set tail which we have so long admired in art. The whole bearing of the animal is altered by this single feature. One would scarcely credit the change. It is not the arti- ficial tail of commerce, produced among civilized (?) na- tions at such a cost in pain and sacrifice in looks for the delectation of ultra-fashionables ; it is the same fine tail you see bred for in Kentucky, set on a haunch which none but the Arabian can boast. The reason why the tail of the Spanish horse is carried so close is that he is of Moor- ish origin. It is, perhaps, impossible to determine the ex- act line of demarcation in race or breeding which sep- arates the close-carried from the high-set tail, or to give the ratio7iale of either ; at the Libyan desert is the geo- graphical line of separation. It suffices to call the horses on tlie west of; the desert Barbs ; those on the east Ara- ARABIAN POLO-PONIES, CAIRO bians. The so-called Godolphin Arabian, one of the progenitors of the English thorough - bred, was really a Barb, and his pictures show this low round croup and tail. He could not have come from the Syrian desert. The tail dates back many hundred equine generations. In his day an " Arabian " or a " Turk " meant any Ori- ental horse. A low-carried tail is sometimes climatic. I have been told by horse-breeders on our Western plains that if for tAvo or three generations the horses have been compelled to turn their backs to the winter blizzards and hug their tails from cold the best of natural tails will droop. As a rule, a severe climate produces a low tail, a hot climate a high one. But this does not quite meet the case of the Barb. Perhaps the Arabian sires which w^ent originally from the Syrian desert to the Barbary States were too few to eradicate in the native race they impregnated the low tail it had, and which most ''horses of the country" have ; they were unable radically to change horses for which as a race nothing had been done in the way of breeding, 294 GOOD AND BAD POINTS and wliicli diirino: some months each year had been obHo^ed for centuries in the uplands or in the foot-hills of the Atlas range to turn their tails to the chill blasts of the rainy season. The horse came into Egypt with the llyksos, or Shep- herd Kings, less than seventeen hundred years before our era. Previous to that time asses were the only specimens of the genus equus. No horse figures on the earlier mon- uments of Egypt. The modern horse of Egypt is a dif- ferent animal, of more recent importation, but also from the Shepherd Kings of to-day, the pastoral princes of the desert. This modern breed has a curiously uniform type. You see them of all sizes, from the polo-pony to the heavy wheeler, but the type remains. If mixed, the strong Ara- bian blood predominates in the look of the offspring. In other countries horses vary both in size and type. You have everything, from a Sheltie to a Percheron, each dis- tinct in kind as well as size ; there are several distinct races. In Egypt the type is constant ; there is but one race. The head is small, the face intelligent and mild, but not generally as fine and bony as one anticipates. The perfect head is as rare as the perfect horse. The neck is rather short jind full in front, with good crest and distinctly fine throttle ; by no means as clean as the thor- ough-ljred's, but much more neatly turned. The crest is full, the withers low. but the shoulders sloping; the barrel not quite as round as one woukl like, but well coupled to a nearly perfect haunch. Looked at from front or rear, the horse has not as much breadth as fills the eye, but one sees far fewer weedy -looking horses than west of the desert. The legs and feet are as good as can be. Even the old broken-down hacks have no windgalls. Nor does one often see a lame horse. Infinite stress is, among the Arabs, laid on aood leus. As the Arabian leirs are uni- A BIG JUMP 297 formly good, whenever a horse shows blemishes or strains in them he is considered unsafe to buy. With us a horse with a few wind-puffs or a splint or two is by no means to be condemned. The Arabians rarely interfere, but often overreach when taught to trot, as they now are by the English, or for the English by the Arabs. The foot is neither too much like the mule's nor too fiat. It is round, rather high, and with naturally a good wide frog. That horror of our climate, scratches, are not often seen in the dry air of Egypt, but the practice of hobbling often scores the fetlocks permanently. The shoe of the Arab horse in Egypt is the plate with a small hole in the middle — a bungling apology for a shoe. In Cairo the European shoe is gaining in use ; among the Arabs the old plate still pre- vails, but it is less bad than among the Syrian Bedouins. The cut shows a very fair type of the average Arabian bought by the English officers or residents in Cairo. For his inches he is hard to beat. The officer's seat is just a trifle long, but excellent. It is a hunting rather than a military seat, bar toes. The Arabian is unquestionably good as a goer ; but in a country where there is neither fence, hedge, ditch, nor other division of the fields, we can scarcely expect a horse to jump. There is, however, a leap recorded to have been taken by one Eagh-Ap {alias Amin Bey) at the time of the massacre of the Mamelukes, which in these days of prize-jumping is certainly worth a notice, whether credited or not. In order to escape from the massacre, this man headed his Arabian for the edge of the clift" where now stands the Citadel of Cairo. The noble animal never paused, but conscious of his master's peril took the leap, a most prodigious one, and landed — the fact is well authen- ticated by the footprints in the stone shown by the pious and horse- loving Moslem of to-day — eighty feet below, 298 NOT "STUNNERS" ut the origi- nal Constantinople leg-gear has begun to cede to the con- venience of "pants" — always the first and costly step in the downfall of national costumes and customs. Trousers are bad enough ; pants are intolerable, Alas, that the landing-place of our brave old knee -breeched Puritan an- cestors should have been desecrated by a three-dollar pair! In a certain fashion, the trouser is the type of all hu- man growth or backsliding. With the loss of the knee- breeches we lost the stateliness of the olden times ; Avith the advent of '' pants,"" gentlemen have become " gents." "Wherever, nowadays, men are careful of their trouser creases, and of the proper length and flow of the garment over the instep, we find the telephone and the electric light and art and letters. Where, as in the Orient, the matter of six inches in the length of either leg of the prevailing trouser is of no material consequence ; where the cut of the leg-clothing is quite disregarded, and a re- spectable or a rich man may appear in public with a ridic- ulous pair of cotton drawers in lieu of the well -brushed and well-fitted broadcloth, w^e find fanaticism, caste, and retrogression. May not the trouser be considered a meas- ure of human endeavor and success, moral, material, and aesthetic ? I submit this as a debatable point. 396 CONSTANTINOPLE HORSES The Turkish cavalryman rides a gelding. The line of demarcation in tlie common use of the stallion and the gelding appears to be the Mediterranean and the yEgean Sea ; in other words, in Europe you find the gelding, in Asia and Africa the stallion. The Hungarian gelding is a larger, bonier horse than the Arabian, averaging, per- haps, a scant fifteen two, generally dark in color, with fairly good points, but far from the whip -cord legs of the Arabian, and a poor tail and head. He is considered serviceable. The Arabian cannot be said to be highly regarded in Turkey, except as a pleasure horse. Carriage- horses are frequently bought among the Eussian trotting- stock ; they are black, and high steppers. The Turkish cavalry looks well as a body, but many of the men ride poorly. There are a great many Germans among the officers, who are doing well for it, but the arm is of re- cent erection. At another great ceremony, the visit of the Sultan to the Treasury in the Old Seraglio on the fifteenth of Ramazan, to pray on the mantle of Mohammed, which is therein carefull}^ preserved, and only taken out once a year, I had a chance to gauge the general run of the horses of Constantinople. The Avorld find his wife (or rather his wives) were present. Everything on four legs turned out. The average struck me as very low. Among some exceedingly good ones there were altogether too many weedy, wretched little ponies under thirteen hands high. The harems of the whole city were on hand, and the at- tendants and eunuchs rode trashy stock of the meanest description. The livery -stables were emptied to carry the in-door female population out for an airing, and I doubt if you could have found so many poor specimens of the equine race in even a South American city, which is saying a great deal. Tiie every-day hack of Constanti- A VETERAN 399 nople, as can be plainlv" seen, is an offshoot of Arabia ; bnt I was not favorably impressed by the influence of desert blood on the horse under civilized conditions of hard work. The average size, weight, and serviceability would have been far greater in Amei'ica. During the day I saw but one or two clean, fine - bred Arabians among the many thousands out. The army and bureau- crats appeared to monopolize the good horses, and there was but a small force of cavalry on duty to line the streets through which his Majesty passed, so that the common stock was the more unduly prominent. Many men in Constantinople ride an English saddle, but still cling to the enormous Oriental blanket which comes back over the horse's loins and is made of a long, hairy, woollen fabric, generally red and white. It is extremely ugly. The saddle and blanket do not match. They represent a transition stage. The plate-shoe through- out Turkey in Europe has been almost driven out by the French shoe. The plate they used to employ in Turkey, unlike the plate of the desert, had as many as six nails inside and six outside, sometimes only five, or five outside and four inside, well distributed. The Sultan's stables contain many fine Arabians. Some are extremely old. I saw one which had carried no less than four sultans — Abdul-Medjid, way back in 1860; and Abdul -Aziz, Murad, and Abdul -Ilamid since. I was presented with an interesting series of pictures of them. Not a few have the curious marks on barrel and haunch and arm, which, by a queer superstition, are often inflicted on Arabians " to make them gallop faster," as they say ; though what this means I am unable to tell, unless they give each two or three year old one special test (as is done m racing stables), and select those who show up the best ; and to make them go the faster use a knife-blade 400 UGLY SCARS rowel. Others explain the cuts in a different way, but it is a blind matter at best, less explicable even than the white foot business in Syria. The cut on the barrel is a long and semicircular one from below upward, as if made by the heel armed with a vicious spur. Into the cut is rubbed (again they say) powdered glass to make an ugly OLD ARAB OP THE SULTAN S STABLE ON ARABIAN scar, much as the German student indulges in unlimited Knelpen to make the cuts received at Pauhen heal up slowly and into rough, and therefore much esteemed scars. On a white horse the scar I have described is peculiarly distressing. The other cuts are straight horizontal ones half-way up the buttock and arm. There seems to be AN OLD ARAB 401 neither rhyme nor reason in the trick. We brand a bronco to mark ownership; these cuts are a mere outcome of silly superstition. Here is the counterfeit presentment of an old Arab who belongs to the imperial stables, and who is sent from time to time to the desert to bring back horses. He retains his normal dress and bestrides a fine specimen of a high -type Arabian. Most of the stud -grooms wear a costume as little like an Arab as can be imagined, much ornamented, and handsome enough in its way. The jack- et and leg -gear are the Syrian, and highly wrought in gold. The feet are incased in boots. The fez is worn, as with every one in Turkey, from the Sultan to the sweep. LXIY The Greek in some respects approaclies more to the European than to the Oriental civilization, but in his equestrianism he may well be added to the latter, though he properly belongs to neither. There is perhaps no odder -looking rider than a Greek peasant on a pack- saddle. The saddle is made so as to be equally adapted to pack or to riding, and while fairly good for the one is wretched for the other. Unlike those of all other peo- ples, this saddle, instead of being placed in the middle of the back or towards the rump, is made to fit so that the centre of gravity lies directly over the place where the English pommel sits— f^., exactly back of the top of the withers. When the Greek rides this horror of a saddle lie is perched directly over the horse's withers, with his legs hanging way in front of the animars. The sad- dle comes no farther rearward than the middle of the l)ack. The seat, owing to its width, is so uncomforta- hle that the man is apt to ride sideways more often than astride. Just where this trick originated it is hard to say. The common Oriental habit is to get the load too far to the rear. In fact, witli donkeys it is usual for natives to ride on the weakest part of the back, just over the kidneys, because the place where the beast is most limber is the easiest to the man. AVith the Greek we have the horse's fore-legs loaded down to a dangerous extent, while the haunches have less than their fair share of work. A THE MODERN GREEK 403 stumble would be far from a luxury, with the freight all in the bows, to speak nautically. The Greek dress, until you get used to it, is too lady- like to be pleasing. The close-falling kilt of Scotland is natural enough. But as in Greece the kilt is made in such ample folds, and starched to so stiff an extent that it stands out absolutely like a ballet-girl's skirt, one never quite gets rid of a certain flavor of hermaphroditism, so to speak, until one has long been among the people. It is bad enough when the Greek wears the picturesque Thessa- lian leggings; but when, as in Albania, he wears what the old Rollo books used to call " pantelettes," one's ideas are turned topsy-turvy, even more than in Tunis, where one sees a pretty Jewess calmly parading up and down the bazaars in tight trousers and short sack-coat, all wonderfully wrought in gold embroidery. In either case, unless your judgment is very firmly fixed, you have to sit down and reflect for a moment, or pull yourself to- gether in some other fashion. The Greek is a high-tuned fellow. Though the blood of the modern Greek is rather Albanian — as also is his dress — than traceable to the heroic Hellene of twenty cen- turies ago, no prince of the blood can be more proud of his lineage, which he deludes himself into believing to be purity itself. The Greek peasant will strut by you with the most kingly air ; he looks down with a kindly but ill- disguised contempt upon the American tourist who could buy up a whole village of his ilk and scarcely know he owned it. He has many really fine qualities, this Greek, coupled to some we are not wont to admire, such as in- ordinate vanity. And in his wonderful garb on a hard- trotting horse, so near the withers that he gets threefold the motion he would get if he sat in the middle of the back, he is truly a spectacle for gods and men. 404 A TREELESS WASTE The Greek rides the veriest runt of a horse, though it has endurance. The fine little Thessalian chunk, of the era of Phidias, which was certainly alive and kicking in the days of Alexander — for was it not he that won the battles of the great Macedonian? — has long since disap- peared. No wonder. The forests were all chopped down aeons ago ; as a consequence the brooks and rivers dried up and the land gradually became a desert. This is the condition everywhere in the Orient. It is a treeless, waterless waste. Thousands of places which, like Jericho Avhen Antony made a present of it to Cleopatra, we know to have been among the most beautiful spots outside of Paradise, are now a howling wilderness of sand and rock. Any American who has travelled through the Orient must assuredly return home an advocate for forestry laws, a pronounced enemy to the ruthless lumberman who is fast sapping the sources of our noble rivers, and well equipped to vote for making public reservations of such essential forest-stretches as the Adirondacks or the wil- derness around Moosehead Lake. It is onl}^ a question of time, if the destruction of our forests continues, when the Hudson River will cease to be navigable, when the beau- tiful granite streams of the White Mountains will be tor- rents in winter and dry beds in summer. The trouble lies in the fact that we Americans either will not believe this fact or that we work on the principle of after us the deluge — of which " the devil take the hindmost " is the more common equivalent. If we go on, it will be "after us hades." Oh, for another Peter the Hermit to preach a crusade on the preservation of our forests ! So soon as the land dried up, so did all that it produced and nourished. To-day (Ti-eece is fit, on all its hill-sides, to feed nothing but sheep and goats. The latter eat every slio(jt of vegetation ; trees cannot grow. The (7 reek com- MODERN GREEK COSTUME THESSALIAN CHUNKS 407 plains that he has no water for irrigation, but he will not work for the future ; he will not only not plant trees, but will not conserve those Avhich themselves strive to grow. 80 soon as a pine-tree struggles up, as many do, to a size big enough to produce resin, he scores it to death to secure enough of its life-blood to keep his nasty wine, heedless of the fact that if he would let a few grow bigger, they would produce resin in abundance and water besides. So died out the noble little Thessalian, whom Homer has immortalized in the horses of Diomed with flowing manes, and to whom Phidias has lent eternity on the splen- did frieze of the Parthenon; who has written his own name in history on the pages which narrate the heroism at the Granicus, the struggle for life at Arbela, the charges seven times repeated at the Hydaspes. By-the- way, it is rather curious that, accurate as the horses of Phidias are in the sequence of step which the photograph alone has revealed to modern artists, they are fault}^ in projecting the fore-feet so far beyond the head. No horse can hold his head so high as to throw his fore-feet far be- yond it. In no photographs, even of high-headed horses, are the fore-feet in any gait even out to a line dropped perpendicularly from the horse's nose. But for all that, Phidias came nearer to giving us the anatomically correct action of the horse than any one prior to mechanical Muybridge ever succeeded in doing. LXY On the Adriatic coast of Turkey, in Albania and Dal- matia, the horse of the country is the same small mean runt you meet with in every poverty-stricken land. He is not without his advantages. He eats little, needs and gets no grooming, stabling, or care ; has a vast deal of endurance — of blows, neglect, and ill-treatment — and car- ries as bio: a load for his size as a bronco. But the bronco can run and keep it' up; the little country brute of the Eastern Adriatic can barely work out of a walk ; nor has he any gaits. He is a poor lot, much like the population which breeds him. The origin of the best strain of Arabian blood has been related by some romancer. While Mohammed was fight- ing his way from liis humble origin to greatness, he once was compelled for three days to lead his corps of twenty thousand cavahy without a drop of water. At last from a hill-top they descried the silver streak of a distant river, and after a short farther march, Mohammed ordered his trumpeter to blow the call to dismount and loose the horses. The poor brutes, starving for water, at once sprang into a mad gallop towards the longed-for goal. Xo sooner loosened than there came the alarm — false as it happened — of a sudden ambush. To horse! was in- stantly blown and repeated by a hundred bugles. But the demand was too great; the parched throats were not to be refused ; the stampede grew wilder and wilder, as twenty thousand steeds pushed desp(3rately for the river- FxVITHFUL MARES 409 banks before them. Of all the frantic crowd but five mares responded to the call. To these noble steeds duty was higher than suffering. They turned in their tracks, came bravely back, pleading in their eyes and anguish in their shrunken flanks, and stood before the prophet. Love for their masters and a sense of obedience had conquered their distress, but their bloodshot eyes told of a fearful torment, the more pathetic for their dumbness. The dan- ger was over, the faithful mares were at once released, but Mohammed selected these five for his own use, and they were the dams of one of the great races of the desert. From them, goes on the legend, have sprung the best of the Arabian steeds. It can, however, scarcely be claimed that the average horse of the land of the rising- sun comes up to this ideal. He must have been bred from the nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-five. On the whole, I must sum up the horse of the Orient as of far from the high grade which is generally under- stood. The splendid specimens are less splendid than our prize-winners or our well-known sires ; the common herd is common enough. The general run is exceedingly at- tractive, but scarcely as good performers as our own equal class. Beyond the borders of civilization they are not higher than the bronco ; in the busy haunts of men they are distinctly lower than our own common horse, certain- ly so for the purposes of our varied commercial and social demands. The exceptional specimens, which partake of the peculiar grace of carriage of the Arabian of art, are more pleasing than a similar creature would be with us ; but to the horseman's eye their points will score for less. Size being taken into consideration throws the balance clearly to our side. The rider of the Orient is what man is everywhere when he lives in daily communion with his horse, but he is not 410 THE BEST HORSEMEN an intelligent horseman. If you want to select a score of men who, after short practice at every style, could show the best performance in racing, hunting, polo - playing, road - riding, herding, cavalry drill or work, escort duty, fantaslya riding, or in any of the usual pleasures or duties of the Occident or the Orient, these men are far and away easier to find in the States than in any country where the influence of the Arabian is still predominant. LXVI Before we leave this interesting part of the world to seek for oddities in riding among the Brahmans and the Buddhists, let us cast a glance at a rider who, from our childhood, has been known to us as a synonym of all that is wild and terrible — the Cossack. Both Turkey and Russia have a large force of irregular mounted troops. These are not for the most part in con- stant service, but hold themselves in readiness to mobilize at any moment. Such are the army corps of Kurdish cavalry in Asia Minor ; and many of the Cossack troops are agriculturists and soldiers at the same time. While organized on substantially the same basis, so much heed is paid to tribal habits that no two bodies of these troops are quite identical. The boys of the Cossack villages from early youth look eagerl}'' forward to their four years of active service, and seek to ])repare for distinguishing themselves while in the ranks. All Cossacks consider horses as their proudest possession. They have plenty of them, and when he joins his squadron the recruit is held to furnish everything but his rifle. As against this he is allowed certain marked privileges beyond the common peasantry who enlist in the infantry, and what he loses in service is wont to be re- placed by the Government. The training of the Cossack lad is a constant prepara- tion for what is considered most valuable in their peculiar tactics — that is, to throw his horse instantly, and use him 412 TRAINING OF THE COSSACK as a rampart from behind which he can lire ; to mount rapidly and attack with the sabre ; to use the sabre in any position or at any gait ; to lire rapidly and with good aim at any speed and in any position ; to turn from the attack at a gallop and seek shelter. In order to accomplish this end, the Cossacks are as lads exercised in horse-vaulting, w^hich they call jigitofka, and this exercise is carried to a hio;h deo;ree of excellence. The ambitious Cossack lad, like the Indian, soon gets to know every horse in his village, and the adaptability of each one to the quick turns and twists of the jigitofka. Surefootedness is a prime quality in his little steed, for on it the Cossack must rely in many of his vaulting exer- cises ; speed comes next, coupled with endurance ; and in other qualities he agrees with what all horse-lovers deem essential. There is a preparatory camp of instruction for these Cossack lads when they have attained a certain age and skill; and when a boy returns from it he is called ajigit or vaulter. At this camp emulation is rampant, and the exercises call out all the lads can do. They pick up ob- jects from the ground ; they jump obstacles standing in the saddle, or with their shoulder in the saddle and feet in air ; they throw their horses at a gallop, or, strictly speak- ing, they stop them suddenly and make them lie down, a thing which is done so rapidly that the first phrase almost describes the feat ; they pick up wounded men when going at speed; they mount and dismount at full gallo}); they leap from one horse to another ; they ride two or more men on one horse and change horses at speed ; they perform i?i patto all they must do in active service on a large scale. All these things are what our Indians do, varied in man- ner to suit a people equally wild, but of a different class. The throwing of horses — but not at speed — was at one COSSACK OF THE GUARD — FIELD TRIM THE COSSACK SADDLE 415 time introduced into some of our cavalry regiments ; Indians always do it. In addition to the vaulting exercises, the Cossack ex- cels, especially in the Caucasus, in the dje/'eet, or dart- throwing at a gallop. This is an old Oriental practice, recently revived. The rider gallops up to the target, which is a ball or a ring, casts his dart at some twenty paces, and immediately turns to seek shelter. Except among the Tartars, no people plays djereet so well as the Cossacks. The Cossack bit is usually an easy one, though there be Cossacks and Cossacks, and they cover all Eussia in Eu- rope and in Asia, and all Turkey in Asia. The saddle, in lieu of being placed as close to the horse's back as it can be, is so constructed as to make the man sit very high above the horse — what seems to us absurdly high — and this height is increased as much as possible by blankets. The stirrups are so hung as to bring the rider's toes on a line directly under his ear, and his knees are much bent. He holds on by his heels and calves, not his knees. The Cossacks defend this seat by saying that when so placed the rider is compelled to learn to balance himself, and that the seat is consequently firmer. This latter opinion can- not be maintained. JS^othing can give you as much firm- ness as closeness to the horse ; the point is not really w^orth discussion. The Cossack habit creates a difficulty in order to train the man by making him overcome it. That the best training consists in overcoming obstacles is true, but this does not make the balance seat any better because the saddle is high. You might as well assert that a rope- dancer is more secure on his rope than on the ground. The Cossacks also claim that their seat is easier on long marches, but our cavalry experience belies this. The Cos- sacks have not made well-recorded marches equal to ours, 416 THE COSSACK'S ABILITY TO RIDE SO far as I can learn. On the whole, the seat does not appeal to me as a good one. I firmly believe that the same amount of work devoted to a seat more like our own would produce better results. But there is no denying the Cossacks the ability to ride, and as a semi-civilized light cavalry they are unequalled. LXVII It is related of a naturally reticent but observant old tar, who had definitely returned to his native village from many trips to foreign shores, that on being asked to give his assembled friends some account of the manners and customs of a certain savage tribe in one of the rarely visited islands of the south Pacific, he shifted his quid to the starboard side of his mouth, and, after considerable preliminary humming and hawing, gave vent to four words : " Manners, none ; customs, nasty." In like fashion I propose to tell you — but at somewhat more length — about the riders of a land which, in comparison with those we have recently visited together, has no riders. India is not a land of horsemen. How can you expect a man who for sole garb wraps a dirty piece of cotton cloth about his loins, wears ear, finger, and toe rings, and ties up his long black hair in a Psyche knot, to be a horseman ? Our American Indian, whose full dress is sometimes a paper collar and a pair of cavalry spurs, shows at least a natural tendency to equestrianism ; not so the pathetic-eyed Hindoo. Practically, over the entire extent of the Indian peninsula, the animal which the cow- boy picturesquely classifies as a beef -critter is (to speak Celtically) the horse of the country. The bullock does everything for the Hindoo as the ass does everything for the denizen of Egypt or Syria. He is as universal in his capacity to help man in his struggle for existence as the little burro of Mexico ; and when he is not sacred he 27 418 BULLOCKS AND BUFFALOES is one of the most useful, as he is always one of the most picturesque, creatures in the service of man. Our idea of any member of the bovine race is associated with clumsiness. We can scarcelj^ imagine even a Jersey heifer hitched to a trotting-sulky. But the working bul- lock of India is not only quick and handy, but he is a rapid walker; and the light-hitch bullock can go a very lively gait. He moves as easily as a deer, and is safely guided by his nose -ring bridle by throwing the single rope-rein over to either side of his hump and giving it a pull. I have seen a pair walking four and a half miles an hour ; they can trot a seven or an eight mile gait, and keep on doing it. They are really attractive animals, with their placid, pleasant faces, sleek mouse -colored hides, round bodies, and fine limbs ; and the hump, which is on all cattle in India — which was there when Alexan- der conquered the Punjaub — becomes a rather pleasing incident in their outline when you get used to it. They bear their yoke well, physically and morally, and are equally good at traction and under a pack. The buffalo — our buffalo is a bison, you remember — does the heavier work, and is somewhat of a slouch, though strong and patient. There are donkeys in many parts of India ; but the ass is not all things to all men as the bullock is. Droves of asses and bullocks mixed (you can hardly tell them apart) work very amicably carrying stone, or grain, or merchandise of any kind ; and the bhistie, or water- carrier, is always a bullock or a buffalo. The small bul- lock measures scarcely hig'her than the ass, and many are no bigger than big dogs. A large number have the fine- bred look you see in our choice cattle ; but in the south they score fancy patterns all over thorn, much to the detri- ment of their looks; and the driver is apt to be a "tail- twister," and often permanently injures that appendage. THE HINDOO NO RIDER 419 The bullock has driven out both the horse and the ass as a general utility beast, and India is not a land of riders mainly because the bullock \yorks better in a cart than under saddle, and because three - quarters of the land is one vast plain on which roads can readily be kept in good condition. There is, of course, a large cavalry force be- longing to the Indian army; but to descant on the mounted troops of the British forces, wherever they may be recruited or serve, is to rehash much of what I have heretofore said about other cavalry. The fact that it is in India by no means makes it Hindoo cavalry ; it is pat- terned on the army system at home. The Sepoys, and especially some of the Sikhs, are often extremely inter- esting ; but not being to the manner born, they are, in riding, gradually' growing to the European pattern. In fact, everything is. The introduction of cheap tapestry Brussels to replace the lovely hand -made rugs of yore, and of yet cheaper imported furniture to stand in the stead of the soft divan of the last generation, is working havoc. Telegraph and railway and steamer are doing their inevitable duty ; and when a Parsee merchant offers you " a rare old bit of native work," you can almost smell Birmingham or Manchester on it. No one denies the value of steam transportation or the telegraph ; but they do destroy many beauties which the strictly useful cannot replace. The Hindoo is not much of a rider in the sense of the Indian or the Arab, and yet one sees an occasional in- teresting specimen in some country districts. In Bombay, save a rare mounted policeman, you find none but Euro- pean riders, generally on Arabian horses, or some prod- uct of Arabian blood. In Calcutta you see more walers —as are called the Australian range horses ; and in the inland cities, where there are garrisons, the waler is 420 ARABIANS AND WALERS common. Wherever the Enghsh go, thither follow polo, racing, athletics. Even at Singapore, within forty miles of the equator, the irrepressible Briton— may his shadow never grow less ! — carries out his regular programme of sport, and in India all the games of the mother-country are played, and tent-pegging and pig-sticking are in great esteem. But this is not Hindoo horsemanship. There are many Arabians imported into India across to Kurrachee or Bombay. A few reach Madras. A small part of the British cavalry is mounted on them, though the regulation horse is either the waler — contracted for in large numbers and delivered in Calcutta — or the country- bred. In Bombay there is an immense sale -stable of Arabians, where several hundred are at times collected. This horse commands a much better price than I should expect. I was asked from three to six hundred rupees — one to two hundred dollars at current exchange — for only fairish specimens. This is double the price of the same horse in Syria. How much it could have been beaten down I do not know. It is curious how, from the Ara- bian Desert, this nimble little creature radiates in every direction, carrying the impress of his blood wherever he goes, and improving every native breed with which he comes in contact. The native Indian horse is not a remarkable creature. They run of all sizes and shapes ; but though a few big- ones come from the Katiwar and Cutchi country, they average small and of rather slim structure. They look as if little had been done for them for many generations and that little onh^ of recent years. I have seen a few in the interior which were said to be native horses that ap- peared strong and able, but rather nngainly in points. If the native liorse was available, or could be raised in suf- ficient numbers, it is clear that the cavalry would not be MANY STYLES 421 mounted to such an extent on walers, not only because na- tive industries are naturally encouraged, but because the waler, though he is of decent size and has some endur- ance, reaches India always partially, often wholly, un- broken, generally goes through a long course of acclima- tion, and IS not universally liked. By unbroken I do not mean that he is as bad as our unbusted bronco, but he is bad enough to give a deal of trouble. I have met English officers who thought very well of the country- bi'ed horses of India, and purchased them for their own use. The Arabian, they say, does not have to go through an acclimation influenza; he is always gentle and Avell trained. Still, Australia has and furnishes good stock. It is the English horse taken thither and bred on the ranges. Some excellent racers have come from Australia to India at half the price their equals would cost in the mother- country, and have won much money. There is no type of rider in India as there is apt to be in other lands. You see in the same province, in the same town, a dozen different styles. In Rajputana, for instance, the men ride with a somewhat natural seat, but many depress their heels in a way to outdo a military martinet, w^hile others will thrust their legs way out like a Mexican on his muscle. The heels are not so uniformly dug into the horse's flanks as among the Arabs, though one sees many men whose sole reliance is on a heel grip, and who seem to have no idea of what their thighs and knees are for. You see as many old condemned army saddles as you see native trees, but they are in some places hidden by a cotton slip-cover like a country grandmoth- er's spare-room chair, in others by a piece of bedquilt tied on or strapped into place, so that you cannot see what the man is riding as he passes by you. As a rule the bit 422 BEDQUILTS is a simple one — a snaffle or a double ring, sometimes a chain bit, but always of European manufacture. One rarely sees a gag, and yet more rarely a native-made bit. Northern India might well be dubbed the land of bed- quilts. What old house-keepers still call "comforters" are, in cold weather, never out of your sight. Every na- tive, unless he is poor, has one to sleep in — a red, yellow, green, or Cashmere pattern, cotton- padded, quilted spread — and this serves as his burnoose, bar grace, whenever he sallies forth. If he be well-to-do, he has him a long coat made of the same stuff, and when he parades up and down on a chilly day, he makes you think of a perambulating feather-bed, all made up. In Bengal there are not so many bedquilts. .You see a population apparently better off, and many men wear Cashmere shawls in every stage of decadence. In lower Bengal the people look well fed. You no longer see the canary-bird leg and spare frame ; the coolies are fairly rounded up and muscular ; and the same remark applies to the Madras Presidency. LXYIII Let me draw you a picture of a Hindoo rider. Imagine this bedquilt individual on horseback. He has a turban of Turkey red, marvellously wound in a hundred folds around his head, and literally as big as a half-bushel basket ; a pea-green comforter is thrown about him, and he wears a pair of tight violet cotton trousers on legs without the semblance of a calf ; w^hile over his saddle a blue quilted padding raises him far above his horse's back. His stir- rup-leathers are wound with yellow cotton cloth, and a pair of huge crimson shoes finish off his nether members. Imagine his dark-brown skin, black piercing eyes, and a long mustache and beard stained brick color, and combed '